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Comment by ta1234567890 | Hacker News Reader

> we need to teach students about project management, planning etc.

This is a problem with education in general. Those things should be taught in middle/high school as essential tools for modern life. Same as personal finances, effective strategies for team/group work, overcoming social anxiety, managing stress and building/maintaining relationships (personal and professional).

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Project Management. I once was working with two CS professors in a UK university. One was full of words (let's call him A). The other was one of the brilllian minds in UI science that helped design the Nokia phones' keypads (let's call her B). Most people disliked B because she had a start, middle, end. She required timelines, milestones, deliverables. Because of that everyone working with her was getting better grades, was more productive, because she was helping people manage themselves better. Prof A had the lazy ones the "deep thinkers, but not the doers.

One thing that (many) academics lack is project management skills. This is why many (that I know) sit on a desk, with a mountain of papers, having a thousand things unfinished. Try doing that in an actual business and see how it plays out..

Being a good teacher doesn't make you a good project manager.

Project management is definitely very important. As a group/team manager where do you put the "deep thinkers, not doers" though? What is their place in business or society?

I personally identify with being a thinker instead of a doer and for most of my professional life struggled trying to find a position from where to contribute without feeling inadequate for not doing/executing.

I don't feel you "push them" to a specific slot. Thinking is good but something needs to come out. A book, a paper, a.. something. A number of people thinking for a common subject need to produce something, not think for 3 months and then start thinking of something else.

The PM skills is to get them to produce efficiently and effectively. Not perpetuate the "sitting and thinking".

Very true! And you can even be a good project manager and be nice about it. For example, setting clear expectations, working together toward deadlines, etc.

I'm not sure I agree. Everyone's situation in a PhD is different enough that the only general concepts you could teach would be high level and useless. Personal finance classes in high school are filled with junk like "make sure to spend less than you earn" and "here's how you balance a checkbook" and "never forget to pay your bills". For group work, the workshops I've taken for it talk about "listen before speaking", "repeat what the other person said so you are sure to understand it". Sure they're kind of useful, but mostly not.

You are saying that you've had bad experiences with courses trying to teach those things. Those things might not be easy to teach. But that doesn't mean they are useless or that they shouldn't be taught. To me, it means the methods of teaching those things, in the workshops you took, should be improved.

I think it's likely that there's no way to teach those courses that is useful to a broad population. It's just such a subjective thing, like imagine teaching a course on "how to be happy". Even someone trying really hard may have limited impact.

Couldn’t agree more. Instead of learning those things in school. I got lucky and had privilege and learned some of them outside of school, and still need to learn others.

But instead, they made sure I knew the name of the boats Columbus sailed in, in 1492. The Niña the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. I was forced to submit to whatever story they told me about the relationship between Columbus and the natives, no matter how untrue it was. But maybe that was the real lesson....

One of the reasons I recommend volunteer work to people who graduated or are about to graduate with nothing like a plan for getting a job is that this is how I learned a lot of organizational skills (and got my first references).

It also makes that, “what have you been doing for the last five months?” question a lot less uncomfortable to answer.

What do we cut out of the curriculum to find space for these things? We are barely able to teach people how to read, write and do arithmetic properly. I agree that these skills are essential, but it is so easy to just say that we should teach it in school.

It's not a space problem if that's all we can teach people in 12 years, it's a teaching problem.

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