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Praise and intelligence: Why telling kids they are smart makes them act dumb

by | Mar 27, 2018 | HowTo

Original Article from https://www.parentingscience.com/praise-and-intelligence.html

Years ago, Americans were reluctant to praise their kids’ intelligence.

Like many people around the world, Americans believed that fawning over children would make them arrogant or narcissistic.

But then something happened. American educators were seduced by the Self Esteem movement. They started promoting the idea that kids need flattery to succeed. Want your child to achieve? Tell him he is bright.

Decades later, the idea is still entrenched in the popular culture. Consider Blue’s Clues, the preschool show that ends each episode with a cheerleading session for kids:

“Hey, you know what? You’re really smart!“

It’s very well-intentioned. But it’s also wrong-headed.

Because it turns out that certain kinds of praise can backfire. In particular, telling kids they are smart can make them act dumb. And here is the evidence.

When you praise kids for their ability, it makes them focus on looking good—not on learning

Kids praised for their intelligence want to keep proving themselves by doing well.

This might sound good, but it’s actually counter-productive.

In a landmark series of experiments on American 5th graders, researchers Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck found that kids behaved very differently depending on the kinds of praise they received.

Kids who were praised for their intelligence tended to avoid challenges. Instead, they preferred easy tasks. They were also more interested in their competitive standing–how they measured up relative to others–than they were in learning how to improve their future performance.

By contrast, kids who were praised for their effort showed the opposite trend. They preferred tasks that were challenging– tasks they would learn from. And kids praised for effort were more interested in learning new strategies for success than they were in finding out how other children had performed.

Kids differed in other respects, too. Compared to kids praised for their effort, kids who were accustomed to being praised for their ability were

  • more likely to give up after a failure
  • more likely to perform poorly after a failure, and
  • more likely to misrepresent how well they did on a task.

And that’s not all. Kids praised for their intelligence were more likely to view their failures as evidence of low intelligence.

When you praise kids for their intelligence, they learn to view their failures as evidence of stupidity

In the experiments by Mueller and Dweck, kids were given moderately difficult problems to solve. When each kid was finished, he was told “Wow, you did really well on these problems. You got….a really high score” (Mueller and Dweck 2002).

In addition, each kid received one of three treatments. He was either

  • praised for his intelligence (“You must be smart at these problems”)
  • praised for his effort (“You must have worked hard at these problems”), or
  • given no additional feedback (the control condition)

Next, kids were given a second set of problems—this time, very difficult ones—and kids were asked to explain why they performed poorly.

The kids who had been praised for their intelligence on previous tasks attributed more of their failure to a lack of intelligence.

But kids praised for their effort responded the same way as controls did—attributing their failure to a lack of effort (Meuller and Dweck 2002).

In other words, telling kids they are smart can make kids LESS likely to view themselves as intelligent.

By praising kids for being smart, we teach them that their performance is a definitive test of intelligence. Kids might enjoy the initial praise, but when they encounter difficult challenges later—as they must—the praise backfires.

Young children thrive on praise, but even they do better when you emphasize effort over ability

Some research suggests that praising intelligence can enhance the motivation of preschoolers (Henderlong 2000).

However, praising intelligence is NOT as effective as praising a child’s effort and choice of strategies (Henderlong 2000).

In one study, preschoolers were presented with two puzzles to solve and then given one of three types of feedback:

  • “Person” praise that emphasized intelligence (“You are a really good problem-solver!”)
  • “Process” praise that emphasized effort and strategies (“You’re finding really good ways to do this!”)
  • Neutral feedback (“You finished both puzzles.”)

Next, kids were given a much tougher puzzle and they experienced failure.

When the preschoolers were offered a similar puzzle weeks later, those kids who had been praised showed more motivation than kids who had received only neutral feedback.

But the kids who had received “process” praise showed more motivation than the kids who had gotten “person praise” (Henderlong 2000).

Another experiment yielded similar results (Cimpian et al 2007). In this study, preschoolers watched a puppet show in which the protagonist drew a picture and was praised by a teacher.

Some preschoolers saw the protagonist receive generic praise about his ability (“You are a good drawer”).

Other preschoolers saw the protagonist receive praise only for that specific drawing (“You did a good job drawing”).

Then the protagonist made a mistake that the teacher commented on. How did the kids feel about the show?

The kids who’d watched the protagonist receive generic praise (“You are a good drawer”) were more upset about the subsequent mistakes. When asked if they would like to draw themselves, these kids answered no.

By contrast, the kids who had been exposed to the specific praise (“You did a good job drawing”) were more likely to show an interest in drawing.

So what’s the bottom line?

The right way to praise

Telling kids they are smart can be counterproductive, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t praise our kids. As mentioned above, even the “wrong” kind of praise can be more motivating than no praise at all. And it’s likely that the right sort of praise — process praise — gives kids an advantage.

In a study tracking American children from infancy to grade school, Elizabeth Gunderson and colleagues (2013) found that the higher the proportion of process praise kids got during early childhood, the more likely kids were to endorse “can do” attitudes when they were in the second or third grade.

What’s important, then, is to emphasize praise that makes kids feel resilient. The problem with telling kids that they are smart or talented is that kids become frightened of failure. They’ve been labeled and they don’t want to do anything to lose that label.

Moreover, kids praised for intelligence tend to believe that intelligence is something innate and unchangeable (Mueller and Dweck 1998). As a result, these kids are rendered helpless by failure. If you fail, you must not be smart. End of story.

If we keep these principles in mind, it becomes clear what kids of praise are the most helpful. Instead of telling your child she is smart or talented, try these alternatives.

  • Praise your child for her strategies (e.g., “You found a really good way to do it”)
  • Praise your child for specific work (e.g., “You did a great job with those math problems”)
  • Praise your child for his persistence or effort (e.g., “I can see you’ve been practicing” and “Your hard work has really paid off”)

Praising kids for effort (and not innate ability) may help them develop a better mindset for learning. For more information, see my article “Harmful beliefs: How a theory of intelligence can hamper your child’s ability to learn.”

And keep in mind other important guidelines

There are other pitfalls to avoid. For instance, even praise for effort can backfire under certain conditions. For more information, see this article on the most effective ways to praise kids.

And what about the flip side of praise — criticism?

Criticism can be just as tricky as praise to get right. Perhaps it’s even trickier because criticism is intrinsically negative.

But some intriguing experiments suggest a solution to the problem — one that is surprisingly simple. Check out my article “Correcting behavior: The magic words that help kids cope with mistakes.”

If you’d like to learn more about the many ways that praise can affect performance, I recommend professor Carol Dweck’s classic book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

References: Praise and intelligence

Cimpian A, Arce H-M C, Markham EM and Dweck CS. 2007. Subtle linguistic cues affect children’s motivation. Psychological Science: 18(4): 314-316.

Gunderson EA, Gripshover SJ, Romero C, Dweck CS, Goldin-Meadow S, and Levine SC. 2013. Parent praise to 1-3 year-olds predicts children’s motivational frameworks 5 years later. Child Development.

Henderlong J and Lepper MR. 2002. The effects of praise on children’s intrinsic motivation: A review and synthesis. Psychological Bulletin 128(5): 774-795.

Mueller CM and Dweck CS. 1998. Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal for Personality and Social Psychology 75(1): 33-52

Tips on 3MT-3 Minutes Thesis

by | Mar 13, 2018 | HowTo

Some experience sharing on 3MT. From my own experience entering 3MT Competition at the university level in 2016 as well as others sharing from the internet.  Hope it will be useful for everyone

Before the day:

SCRIPT

1.     Have a killer story

This is probably THE most important thing you can possibly do. Everyone loves a good story, so ensure your presentation has one, include a beginning, middle and end. Ensure your last sentence focuses on the take home message. This not only makes it easy for the audience to follow, but a good story is also memorable.

How to do? Write your own story/3mt script yourself. Separate by section beginning/middle/end and write sentences separately with numbering list.  Make sure your script fit on 1 sheet of papers. I find it easy to manage rather than you have a call card etc.  But after all it depends on you.

Why: Easy to memorise/recall the number and what topics/sentences. Easy to plan your body language/expression/movement on stage/easy to track your timing.

During practise-I put time remark when I arrive at certain sentences. So, when minutes 2:55 seconds arrive I already at my last sentence and said my last word at minutes 2:59.

2.     Create analogy that is relatable to the audience

A good analogy helps. Your research will likely span several complex research areas. The real key to this is explaining them in a relatable way. make sure your analogy is something that everyone will be able to identify with, otherwise it’ll just end up complicating the matter further. Keep it simple

3.     Check out other people’s stories

One of the most useful things I find, is looking at what other people have done before me. For the 3MT competition especially, it’s unlikely you’ve ever done anything like this before. Looking at how other people tackled the problem can be very helpful.

4.     Tailor your talk to your audience (“an intelligent but non-specialised audience”)

Don’t introduce yourself, don’t acknowledge your lab members or funding bodies and don’t show data!  Your audience for this presentation wants to know the bigger picture. Explain what you’re doing, but leave out the detail.  (More like telling your abstract but without technical information).

5.     Start your talk by introducing why this topic would be of interest to audience

make it relevant to your audience, so that they will be bothered to listen in the first place.

SLIDES

6.     Carefully think about what you should include on your PowerPoint slide.

Only include things that are relevant and ensure that any images you use are of good quality (don’t use images with watermarks – they are copyright protected). Don’t overcrowd your slide as this looks unprofessional and confusing, and avoid distractions like flashing lights or super brightly coloured backgrounds.  Follow design guideline, colour scheme, focal point, etc.

BODY LANGUAGE/APPEARANCE

7.     physical appearance does matter

but only so far as to ensure that you don’t wear anything distracting, otherwise people will focus on that instead of your talk.  Choose your best and suitable outfit. Don’t overdo it and yet don’t look pale and boring.  Stand by- ladies bring blazer because you might need to put in the head mic controller/battery in the pocket of your blazer. If not, you have to hold it, so it will limit your movement later.

8.     Body language is important.

Plan your movement and facial expression according to your script. Be aware of the perimeter set by the organiser. Normally they marked where you should stand and limit you can move.  Keep in mind if your hands are flailing around, as this can distract your audience. Don’t stand behind the safety of your lectern staring into the computer, praying for the three minutes to pass! Get out and about, engage with your audience, look each of them in the eye (but don’t stare at just one person the whole talk – this is a pet hate of mine!). And smile! –That is why you need to rehearse in front of the mirror. 

9.     Speak in an engaging manner.

If you don’t sound like you’re interested in the topic, why would we be? Most people aren’t very confident when they do public speaking, but you need to get over yourself and fake it until you make it! It’s only 3 minutes of your life!

10.  Include Humour

Humour can go down well in a presentation, and it can help make your story more memorable. However, be prepared for all outcomes. If your joke goes well allow a few seconds before continuing to let the laughter sink in. Equally be prepared for the audience to find things funny that you didn’t expect. And if your joke unfortunately does fall flat, have a back-up plan or brush past it onto the next part of your presentation. Even humour also you need to practise, but don’t too fake.

11.  Practice, practice, practice

Practice by yourself, in front of the mirror as well as of other people, and especially people who do not know what your research is about. Practise in front of mirror to know how does your facial expression and movement looks like in front of people.  Test few expressions until you find the one that suits well and appropriate for the audience.  Rehearse the pronunciation of your speech too. Practise on timing setting too to make sure you cover everything in 3 minutes.  Pick a practice partner, you can give each other advice. Multiple people in your research group entering? Great, dedicate a group meeting to presentation feedback. For this, you can never practice enough.  Also record you practise video or audio. So, you can recheck and analyse yourself what should you do to improve the presentation.

On the day:

12.  Find your happy place (soul solitude)

Before your big moment, do something that relaxes you. Don’t go in stressed. Go for a run, eat lots of chocolate, just do something you enjoy.  Come early and get familiar with the environment/ competition event. If possible have on quick test on set or you can just visualize how you will perform later.   Be familiar with the equipment, especially if they are using collar mic.  So, make sure you are ready and standby with your own items/gadgets to make you feel comfortable

13.  Smile, be happy and sincere

A smile goes a long way, the audience will immediately click with you, and it will help you yourself feel more confident. Show enthusiasm for your research topic, the audience will feed off it and enjoy the whole experience a lot more.  Even if the judges show their serious face, don’t bother and just smile. Find other nice, concern faces for some eye contacts.  Eye contacts should be too long.  Just a quick one throughout the area and repeat it again.

14.  Don’t run over time, but don’t rush!!

The three-minute time limit is very strict. Do not go over, even by a second. However, that doesn’t mean you should talk at a million miles an hour to get every tiny possible detail of your research project in. The audience just won’t follow. Instead, have a good story and tell it in good time. Plan some buffer time into your presentation, so that if you do stumble you know there are a few seconds of leeway.  Remember you have practice and timing the presentation, so you know you already in safe hand.

15.  Never give up

There can only be one winner, and if it wasn’t you this time, that doesn’t mean your presentation wasn’t awesome. Heck, just having the guts to stand up there and try it is something on its own. If it wasn’t your day then don’t worry, there will always be other opportunities. The only way to improve presentation skills is to do more presentations.  Your confidence and experience you gain from 3MT will be very useful in a future presentation.

16.  But most importantly: Have fun!

Sure, the 3MT can be both stressful and nerve-wracking, but it is also a lot of fun! It is a great way to meet other researchers across the Uni, see what they’re up to, and share your own research. Enjoy the experience as much as possible and take every opportunity it throws your way

What is Webometrics

by | Feb 28, 2018 | HowTo

The Ranking Web or Webometrics is the largest academic ranking of Higher Education Institutions. Since 2004 and every six months an independent, objective, free, open scientific exercise is performed by the Cybermetrics Lab (Spanish National Research Council, CSIC) for the providing reliable, multidimensional, updated and useful information about the performance of universities from all over the world based on their web presence and impact.

History

The Cybermetrics Lab has been developing quantitative studies on the academic web since the mid-nineties. A first indicator was presented during the EASST/4S conference in Bielefeld (1996) and the collection of web data from European universities started in 1999 supported by the EU funded project EICSTES. These efforts are a follow-up of our scientometric research started in 1994 that has been presented in the conferences of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI, 1995-2011) and the International Conferences on Science and Technology Indicators (STI-ENID, 1996-2012) and published in high impact journals (Journal of Informetrics, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Scientometrics, Journal of Information Science, Information Processing & Management, Research Evaluation and others). In 1997 we started the edition of an all-electronic open access peer-reviewed journal, Cybermetrics, devoted to the publication of webometrics-related papers.

In 2003 after the publication of the Shanghai Jiatong University breakthrough ranking, the Academic Ranking of World Universities(ARWU), we decided to adopt the main innovations proposed by Liu and his team. The ranking will be built from publicly available web data, combining the variables into a composite indicator, and with a true global coverage. The first edition was published in 2004, it appears twice per year since 2006 and after 2008 the portal also includes webometrics rankings for research centers, hospitals, repositories and business schools.

Objectives and motivation

The original aim of the Ranking is to promote academic web presence, supporting the Open Access initiatives for increasing significantly the transfer of scientific and cultural knowledge generated by the universities to the whole Society. In order to achieve this objective, the publication of rankings is one of the most powerful and successful tools for starting and consolidating the processes of change in the academia, increasing the scholars’ commitment and setting up badly needed long term strategies

The objective is not to evaluate websites, their design or usability or the popularity of their contents according to the number of visits or visitors. Web indicators are considered as proxies in the correct, comprehensive, deep evaluation of the university global performance, taking into account its activities and outputs and their relevance and impact.

At the end a reliable rank is only possible if the web presence is a trustworthy mirror of the university. In the second decade of the 21stcentury the Web is key for the future of all the university missions, as it is already the most important scholarly communication tool, the future channel for the off-campus distance learning, the open forum for the community engagement and the universal showcase for attracting talent, funding and resources.

Philosophy and justification

Webometrics only publish a unique Ranking of Universities in every edition. The combination of indicators is the result of a careful investigation and it is not open to individual choosing by users without enough knowledge or expertise in this field. Other publishers provide series of very different rankings using exactly the same data in different fashions that is completely useless and very confusing.

Webometrics is a ranking of all the universities of the world, not only a few hundred institutions from the developed world. Of course, “World-class” universities usually are not small or very specialized institutions.

Webometrics is continuously researching for improving the ranking, changing or evolving the indicators and the weighting model to provide a better classification. It is a shame that a few rankings maintain stability between editions without correcting errors or tuning up indicators.

Rankings backed by a for-profit company exploiting rank-related business or with strong political links reflected in individual ranks should be checked with care.

Research only (bibliometrics) based rankings are biased against technologies, computer science, social sciences and humanities, disciplines that usually amounts for more than half of the scholars and students in a standard comprehensive university. Webometrics also measure, in an indirect way, other missions like teaching or the so-called third mission, considering not only the scientific impact of the university activities, but also the economic relevance of the technology transfer to industry, the community engagement (social, cultural, environmental roles) and even the political influence.

Webometrics uses link analysis for quality evaluation as it is a far more powerful tool than citation analysis or global surveys. In the first case, bibliometrics only counts formal recognition between peers, while links not only includes bibliographic citations but also third parties involvement with university activities. Surveys are not a suitable tool for World Rankings as there is not even a single individual with a deep (several semesters per institution), multi-institutional (several dozen), multidisciplinary (hard sciences, biomedicine, social sciences, technologies) experience in a representative sample (different continents) of universities worldwide.

Research output is also key topic for Webometrics, but including not only formal (e-journals, repositories) publications but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their local community.

We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

Candidate students should use additional criteria if they are trying to choose university. Webometrics ranking correlates well with quality of education provided and academic prestige, but other non-academic variables need to be taken into account.

Composite indicators and Web Impact Factor

Probably one of the major contributions of the Shanghai Ranking was to introduce a composite indicator, combining with a weighting system a series of indicators. Traditional bibliometric indexes are built on ratios like the Garfield’s Journal Impact Factor that based on variables following power law distributions is useless for describing large and complex scenarios. The Ingwersen proposal in 1997 for a similarly designed Web Impact Factor (WIF) using a links/webpages (L/W) ratio is equally doomed by the mathematical artifacts that generates.

Following the Shanghai model we developed an indicator transforming the ratio L/W into the following formula aL+bW, where L & W should be normalized in advance and a & b are weights adding 100%. We strongly discouraged the use of WIF due to its severe shortcomings. The composite indicator can be designed with different sets of variables and weightings according to the developer’s needs and models.

Design and Weighting of Indicators

Webometrics uses an “a-priori” scientific model for building the composite indicator. Other rankings choose arbitrary weights for strongly dependent variables and even combine raw values with ratios. None of them follow a logical ratio between activity related and impact related variables, i.e. each group representing 50% of the total weighting. Referring to the individual variables, some of them have values larger than zero for only a few universities and others segregate universities according to differences so small that they are even lower than their error rates.

Prior to combination the values should be normalized, but the practice of using percentages is mostly incorrect due to the power law distribution of the data.

Webometrics log-normalize the variables before combining according to a ratio 1:1 between activity/presence and visibility/impact groups of indicators.

 

Advantages and shortcomings

        Coverage. Webometrics is the largest ranking by number of HEIs analyzed, but there is no classification of the different institutional types, so research-intensive universities are listed together with community colleges or theological seminaries. However the rank segregates all of them so it is not difficult to build sub-rankings for those interested.

        University missions. The direct measurement of teaching mission is virtually unfeasible and those evaluations based on surveys (subjective), ratios of students/scholars (data unreliable and results not segregating) or employment results (with many variables involved other than quality of teaching) should be avoided. Webometrics rank indirectly this mission using web presence as an indicator of the commitment of the scholars with their students. It is not perfect but the future of this mission is clearly in the web arena and any institution or individual not realizing that is losing ground very fast.

        Big numbers. Quality of the data does not only depend of the source used, but also of the numbers involved. For example, the number of universities with more than one Nobel Prize is probably lower than 200 (including all of those granted since 1900) that makes very difficult to rank them correctly. The same applies to citation data, the most powerful bibliometric tool that is providing figures in the order of thousands and tens of thousands. The link data offer far larger big number, usually two or even three orders of magnitude larger. Certainly the web indicators are noisier but statistically they are better suited for uncovering patterns and discriminating larger number of institutions.

        Size-dependent. There is no debate about this issue: The most popular rankings, including Webometrics, are size dependent, although size does not refer to number of scholars or students (Harvard or especially MIT are not large in that sense) but probably to resources (current funding, past funding reflected in buildings, laboratories or libraries). But this criticism is not correct as really none of the rankings are really measuring efficiency but global performance. The economic wealth of the nations can be measured in terms of GDP (USA, China, Japan) or in terms of GDP per capita (Luxembourg, Emirates, Norway), both indicators are correct but their objectives are completely different.

        Bad naming practices. University managers are still fighting for convincing their authors to assign the correct affiliations in the scientific publications. Situation is not far better in the Web with several hundred institutions having more than one central webdomain, preserving active old domains, using alternative domains for international (English) contents or sharing domains with third parties. Even among those universities with only one domain, many of them change the domain frequently, sometimes without any apparent good reason for doing that. A strange relatively common situation is when those changes are for transferring a national top level domain to an “.edu” domain (that usually refers to a USA university!) even when the country has a clearly defined academic subdomain (edu.pl, edu.ua, ac.kr). These changes and, especially the preservation along the time of several domains, penalizes very severely in Webometrics ranking. But of course it is also a very misleading practice that decreases the web visibility of the universities. Probably it has not so strong effect on local populations, but it is really confusing for the global audiences.

        Fake and non-accredited universities. We try to do the best for not including fake institutions, checking especially online, international and foreign branches if they have independent web domain or subdomain. Any suggestion on these issues is greatly welcomed.

For more information please contact:

Isidro F. Aguillo

Cybermetrics Lab – CSIC
Albasanz, 26-28
28037 Madrid. SPAIN

Bibliography:

– Aguillo, I. F.; Granadino, B.; Ortega, J. L.; Prieto, J. A. (2006). Scientific research activity and communication measured with cybermetric indicators. Journal of the American Society for the Information Science and Technology, 57(10): 1296 – 1302.

– Wouters, P.; Reddy, C. & Aguillo, I. F. (2006). On the visibility of information on the Web: an exploratory experimental approach. Research Evaluation, 15(2):107-115.

– Ortega, J L; Aguillo, I.F.; Prieto, JA. (2006). Longitudinal Study of Contents and Elements in the Scientific Web environment. Journal of Information Science, 32(4):344-351.

– Kretschmer, H. & Aguillo, I. F. (2005).New indicators for gender studies in Web networks. Information Processing & Management, 41 (6): 1481-1494.

– Aguillo, I. F.; Granadino, B.; Ortega, J.L. & Prieto, J.A. (2005). What the Internet says about Science. The Scientist, 19(14):10, Jul. 18, 2005.

– Kretschmer, H. & Aguillo, I. F. (2004). Visibility of collaboration on the Web. Scientometrics, 61(3): 405-426.

– Cothey V, Aguillo IF & Arroyo N (2006). Operationalising “Websites”: lexically, semantically or topologically?. Cybermetrics, 10(1): Paper 4. http://cybermetrics.cindoc.csic.es/articles/v10i1p4.pdf

Journal Ranking

by | Feb 28, 2018 | HowTo

Being part of UTM DNA, it is a must for us the academician to produce a quality and top-notch publication.  UTM as a Research University (RU) must ensure that we as team comply with MyRA II.  Hence, one of the criteria is to publish your work in Q1 or Q2 Journal.  SCIMAGO is the most useful website to check the ranking of the journal.  Click for SCIMAGO here and don’t forget to bookmark it.♦

10 Tips for Success for Engineering Students and Others Too

by | Feb 21, 2018 | HowTo

10 Tips for Success for Engineering Students

If you’re a current engineering student, here are ways to put yourself on the fast track to success.

10 Tips for Success for Engineering Students

According to a recent survey by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, one third of college freshmen plan to major in science and engineering, while about 8 percent of all first-year students intend to concentrate in engineering proper. Some of these engineering students are destined to land major leadership roles in the United States and worldwide, while others are . . . well, every field has its “lesser lights.”
We were interested in finding out what current engineering students could do to put themselves on the fast track to career success. We invited visiting blogger Edward Crawley, professor of engineering and director of the Bernard M. Gordon Engineering Leadership Program at MIT, to share with us the advice he gives his own undergraduate engineering students. Here are his best tips, most of which would work for any career-aspiring college student:

1. Identify the people who inspire you, and find out what makes them tick. If you love Apple products, Steve Jobs may be your idol, or perhaps you love the Segway and its creator, Dean Kamen. You can easily find out a lot of information about Jobs and Kamen—or just about any other prominent person in technology—so use it to look into what’s helped these people and their companies become so successful. Then emulate their good traits in your personal, scholastic, and professional life.

2. Develop a portfolio of projects. Participate in every hands-on, experiential learning opportunity that a balanced schedule allows. This way, you’ll have something unique to show a prospective employer (or venture capitalist) when you graduate, while other students will only be able to list their courses. In addition, you’ll be far more likely to retain the knowledge you’ve gained in classes because you’ll be applying it and, in the process, boosting your communication and interpersonal skills.

3. Learn the value of networking. When it comes to being a leader, whom you know is almost as important as what you know. Attend lectures on your campus and introduce yourself to the speakers. Check with your school’s alumni association to get a list of alumni from your program who want to connect with undergraduates.

4-Star Tip. In addition to E-mail, you can use LinkedIn or other social media tools to connect online. But remember: There’s no substitute for a traditional, face-to-face meeting, so if you can find a way to meet in person, that’s always the best.

4. Work in teams as much as you can. Whether it’s creating a solar-powered car, participating in a sport, or writing for the school paper, get involved with an organization that requires a team effort to produce great results. Throughout your career, you can be sure you’ll work in teams, and the skills you develop in school will help prepare you to lead teams when you graduate.

5. Seek informal leadership roles. You’re always a leader, whether you’re officially in charge of a team or not. Sounds counterintuitive, but you can lead from any position in an organization by influencing how people work together and how they make decisions. Usually people think that the leader is the president or the manager, but if you learn how to recognize and deal with various leadership styles from any position in a team, you’ll be seen as a leader when you take on your first job or internship.

6. Find your flaws—and fix them. As with any skill, leadership needs constant improvement. When you are part of a team, try to create a way to get feedback from team members, group leaders, and professors. When you have concrete feedback on how people view you, you can work to improve your skills, including communication and leadership. Plus, you’ll learn how to accept—and give—constructive criticism. That’s absolutely necessary for your future career.

7. Take a business class. As an engineer, it’s not enough for you to be technically proficient; you need to have business savvy. If you’re going to be a leader, you need to understand what a P&L is (also known as an income statement), read organization charts, know how to negotiate contracts, and be familiar with the myriad other functions that every top engineer needs to know. Otherwise, you won’t understand what to do when an accountant, lawyer, or middle manager gets in the way. A business course or two can take you a long way, and these classes are often easier to pass than your calculus course!

8. Take design and other humanities classes. There’s a wide world out there beyond problem sets, laboratories, and theory. Take a visual design course so you’ll learn to represent ideas graphically. Take a cognitive science course to learn how people interpret the world and understand it. Take a literature course to develop your knowledge and appreciation of the classic books, which will help you write and communicate more effectively.

5-Star Tip. Tomorrow’s leaders will have to communicate effectively across international borders and be familiar with other cultures, so develop some proficiency in another language, travel abroad, or meet students from other cultures. Start “globalizing” right at college.

9. Make your summers productive. Employers place tremendous value on practical experience. Seek out internship opportunities actively and early in your academic career. Try to demonstrate through your internships a series of evolving leadership experiences, and use the internships to build your portfolio of actual projects/products. New graduates who can show a commitment to using their summer to continue to learn are always viewed more seriously by a prospective employer.

10. Recruit and develop your personal board of directors. As an undergraduate, you might feel alone when confronted with hard decisions about the courses to take, jobs to apply for, or even balancing school work and your personal life. You won’t feel alone if you develop a personal board of directors just for you. Just as a company has a board that guides the organization, you can stock your board with professionals from organizations and companies, as well as former teachers and knowledgeable family friends.

Extra Pointer. Be sure to “nurture” your board of directors: Keep in touch with them, provide them regular updates, ask them for guidance, and be sure to thank them for any help they provide. And don’t be afraid of conflicting advice. If members offer different suggestions, you’ll have the occasion to balance off one idea against another and make your own decision—just like at a real company.

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