4 Skills for succeeding in STEM fields
If you are a student or if you are someone who wants to enter one of the STEM fields (STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), and if you find it surprisingly different from everything you have learnt before, that is because it is. You’ve found the right article if you are looking for some help in navigating these subjects. Here are four skills that can guarantee success in the STEM fields, along with strategies to develop them.
What makes STEM fields different
First things first, let’s understand what factors make STEM fields so different from the others? Why is there such hype around it? Why would succeeding in STEM be any different from any other field?
I will go into the details about this in a future article. But put simply, the STEM fields are cross-applicable and objective fields of study. Their cross-applicability means that STEM knowledge can be applied to many different industries. This is why expertise in almost all STEM fields is in high demand.
But because these fields are objective, i.e. there are clear right and wrong answers, becoming an expert in these fields becomes considerably harder. Additionally, the truths in these fields are often so complex, that they require multiple years of study and practice. Every year, you build on top of the knowledge you gained the year before.
Due to these properties of STEM fields, they become significantly harder, yet incredibly rewarding, to excel at. For some people, practices and skills that might have worked for them earlier might not work here. I have observed various successful and not-so-successful STEM professionals, and have first-hand experience of growing in Computer Science and becoming an expert. I am presenting my observations and experience in this concise article.
Essential Skills for Success
To be successful at anything, you need to be able to learn. For anyone who has questions regarding how to do that efficiently and effectively, I always recommend watching this 2013 TEDx talk by
called “The first 20 hours — how to learn anything”.Being an expert in STEM fields requires a lot of knowledge and understanding of mathematics, logic, reasoning and deductions along with years of long hours of studying the work of millions of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians who have worked before. But it is crucial to understand that all of these skills can be learned. And that nobody starts off as an expert. It starts with a single step. But it requires a framework to do so efficiently.
Resourcefulness
If you are switching into the STEM fields without the support system of a university, this becomes the most important skill to master. There are essentially four functions of being resourceful:
- Discover study material
- Find guidance/mentorship
- Setup regular practice
- Find communities
To be resourceful is to find the right study material, the right people to talk to, accessible resources for practice and a source for ample motivation.
Since there isn’t any established place to find all of these, you should find multiple options for each of these and choose the ones you want to stick with.
Students at technical universities are often provided with study material and practice resources by the university. They also get guidance from their professors (and alumni) as well as support and motivation from their classmates. But not everyone is lucky enough to get into an institution that is able to provide all of these things, and a large population of people that wants to excel, aren’t students at technical universities. Even as a student at a university that does provide all of these, one has to discover the processes to get access to these facilities.
Resilience
Once you set yourself up for practice, you come across the need for the second skill: resilience, which is the most important skill of all, in my opinion. In most other disciplines, after gaining an in-depth understanding of a few core concepts, it becomes easier to grasp the nuances. And after a certain point, performance only remains a matter of practice and expertise becomes a function of experience. But in STEM subjects, practice and experience are necessary but not sufficient. To excel, one really needs to step out of his/her comfort zone and learn a completely new concept. The learning curve is not exactly the same anymore.
What I have observed about STEM subjects is that it is easier to get started and understand the usefulness of these subjects. We all do that as children in school, learning the basics of science and mathematics. Many might have experienced it to be as easy to learn to count, as it is to learn the alphabet of their mother tongue. Maybe even easier, because of the repetitive nature of numbers. And yet, for many, math becomes the stuff of nightmares as they grow older.
Extending the example of Mathematics, the first hurdle comes when we are introduced to the arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). Especially when we’ve to learn the multiplication tables. Clearing this hurdle makes it easier to learn profit and loss, units and measurements etc. Then, in middle school, it becomes hard to grasp topics like algebra and trigonometry. After gaining comfort with these concepts, learning a lot of other things becomes considerably easy, like geometry, complex numbers and statistics. And then again, a new concept like calculus or logic becomes really tough to understand.
This is a trend that is very common for STEM subjects, no matter how much time you have spent. There is always that next big hurdle; sometimes known, sometimes unknown. The real experts actually know that they know very little about their field — they have only mastered one very tiny segment of the branch, and that too, only in relative terms. Nobody knows everything about anything.
And the beauty of these subjects is that you don’t need to know everything about anything. Almost any amount of knowledge and mastery of these topics makes you more useful for a plethora of jobs. That, combined with the perennial opportunity for growth, makes practitioners of STEM subjects really useful for the society that they are a part of. And the key to being exceptionally successful is to be resilient in your practice and to have a relentless need for learning.
Robustness
Although you can start from anywhere, being thorough with your study is very important for maintaining the ability to improve in the STEM fields. As mentioned earlier, in the STEM subjects, you need to keep building on the knowledge and skills that you have gained earlier. Your previous knowledge serves as the foundation for whatever you want to learn next. So if your foundations are not sturdy and robust, your grasp of the subject will never be strong.
No Definition of Fundamentals
One of the best things about the STEM fields is that there is no definition of fundamentals in any of them. There are so many layers of abstraction at the core of every subject that you can basically start from anywhere and grow your understanding in both directions. In fact, they are all ultimately based on the fundamental physical laws of nature, that haven’t been discovered yet. This might sound counter-intuitive, but let me give you some examples that you can relate to.
In the field of computer science, you can start writing a program in any language. I learnt programming in C, which according to my professors, was fundamental to the understanding of computer science as a field. Now here is the interesting bit: computers do NOT understand the C language. Code written in C needs to be compiled into an assembly language, like MIPS or x86, before that is again converted into machine-interpretable code in 0s and 1s. I didn’t know this until a year later when I took the Computer Organization course, and it didn’t matter. I had already started to write various programs that could accomplish all sorts of results. In fact, many people today start programming using Python; the most popular compiler of Python is written in C. And that does not hinder their progress. I have a friend, who started from UI design, learnt about CSS from there, and eventually learnt JavaScript, all just to be able to design amazing user interfaces.
Similarly, to understand biology, you didn’t have to first understand the underlying chemistry in the cells, or even how those cells were formed in the first place. I have friends who chose to study chemical engineering because they loved studying chemistry in high school, and then were surprised that a large part of chemical engineering was just physics and statistics.
All the subjects of the STEM fields are so tightly intertwined and coupled that you are bound to run into one from another as you keep learning. This makes everything complicated in one sense, but also incredibly simple in another. It basically means that this is no starting point, which means you can start from anywhere.
Build intuition
As you keep learning and building your knowledge castle, there will be so much to learn that you will barely recall what did you study and where. But with practice, the concepts will slowly become your second nature. Eventually, you will tackle a point where your intuition is wrong, and you will be forced to challenge your assumptions. So you will naturally start looking for more knowledge to understand why your intuition was wrong. This is a very rewarding cycle to be in. This helps you work without having to remember all the facts and helps you keep correcting your intuition based on objective feedback.
This kind of feedback system is rare in most non-STEM fields. The objective nature of the intuition building process is what gives the learning curve in STEM fields its unique shape. This also gives new entrants to the field a fair chance to challenge (and contribute to the learning of) the experts. This is the reason you would come across many incredibly vibrant and productive communities in STEM — because there is so much for the experienced to gain from interacting with a junior.
Reflection
All the skills that we discussed till now are helpful for maximizing the engine output, but without steering your ship in the right direction, you wouldn’t reach any meaningful goal. You’d be lost in the sea of options and oceans of existing knowledge out there. This is why you need to know, or at least attempt to know, where is it that you are heading.
Endless revisions of the direction
There are a few thought exercises that you can perform privately to know if you are heading in the right direction or not. These exercises are not about the STEM field, but rather about yourself. The universe of the STEM fields is vast. I mean, really HUGE. It literally encompasses everything there was, is and will be in the physical universe. You need to choose your voyage here. It is not easy, and this decision might not even be possible on day 1. In fact, you need to perform these exercises over and over again. You will start with exploring in all directions, and then, you can start with small decisions which narrow your choices. And over uncountable iterations, hopefully, you will find a direction that is fruitful.
Track yourself
This is what will finally give you satisfaction. If you do all the hard work, in finding your direction, in finding the resources, putting in the practice and building robustness, and do not measure it, you will either never fulfil your true potential, or you will never feel that you have. The only way to really feel satisfied with your progress and still be motivated to do more is to objectively measure it. I usually track myself in both ways, quantitatively and qualitatively. My quantitative measurement is about the effort that I have put in throughout my days, weeks and months. I use RescueTime to measure that objectively for me; I have installed its apps on every device I use. My qualitative measurement happens through to-do items and personal OKRs. I maintain my personal scrum board and OKRs on Notion. You are free to choose whatever solution works for you.
I love to hear the Before Breakfast daily podcasts by
, and I especially subscribe to her ideas about personal time management. One of my favourites among her long list of ideas is the realization that we have much more time in our weeks than we think. We all have 168 hours in our weeks; if you subtract 48 hours of work, 56 hours (8 hours x 7 days) of sleep and 28 hours (4 hours x 7 days) of daily routine and refreshment activities, we will still be left with 36 extra hours every week! Which is almost as much as a full-time job. Another one of her ideas, that I really like, is the definition of “wasted time”: Wasted time is the time that you spent doing things that don’t give happiness to you or someone you care about, immediately or sometime in the future. Both these concepts are very crucial in measuring ourselves — and if we embrace them, we’d be much happier with how we spend our days, on most days, if we start to track ourselves.Gaining these skills is very rewarding, to your soul as well as your bank accounts. Being resourceful means that you will never feel helpless in any endeavour. Being resilient and robust will make sure that you are actually good at the subject that you invest your time in. And reflecting regularly will ensure that you are always on the path that you desire the most.
You will be happy at work, and at home. Always at peace with yourself, and with the sense of achievement at the end of every week, month and year.