S-STEM Scholar Todd Leavitt's Blog

Starting in 7th grade I really did not like math. It always came easy to me, but when it got hard I became embarrassed and started to resist. All through high school I just went through the motions and was so excited when I didn't have to take a math class my senior year because I met all of my requirements. Fast forward two years, I am a returned missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saint, and I am trying to decide what I am going to do. My first choice, like many other students, was psychology. I wasn't prepared to do almost 10 years of school in order to get a good job, so I knew psychology wasn't the answer. I happened to take a class called Statistics in Psychology that I really enjoyed and I did well in. So I sucked up my fear of math and decided to go to school to learn and not to just do what is easy. I have loved my journey in STEM and am really excited to graduate this semester and start working in STEM. Everyday is a challenge and I enjoy le...

This semester we were introduced to the idea of S.M.A.R.T. goals. The acronym stands for I was first introduced to this concept when I was serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Seoul Korea. We actually made personal and companionship goals every day and every week. Since then I haven't really made a SMART goal. Our mentor challenged us to make a couple for ourselves so here are mine.         By the end of the summer prepare myself for my machine learning course next semester by completing an R course in DataCamp and starting a machine learning course.          Improve my relationship with my wife by doing something on her to-do list every day for at least two weeks. Comment on the last one. My wife's love language is very much acts of service, so that is why I think it will improve our relationship. I'll have to be accountable in a later post and let you know how everything went!

In an earlier post I talked about mindset and how changing our mindset will effect our success. Today I want to follow up with my experience applying a growth mindset to my classes. When I was a kid I usually excelled at my classes. Because I this I assumed I was just smart and that things would just always would come easy to me. When I started to take harder classes in high school this mentality bit me in the behind and I started to lose motivation to try hard, especially in my math classes. I assumed that I was in fact not a math person. When I started to go to college I was faced with a decision that we have everyone comes at least once. What should I do with for work? Having been recently married and having a desire to provide for my family I knew that I didn't have time to really search around and waste time. Having always heard that the higher paid jobs use math I started math classes again with that attitude that I was going to work hard and actually learn. Believe or no...

I have always been one to keep to myself. I wouldn't consider myself a complete introvert, but when it comes to school I tend to show up to class, go home and do my work without much interaction between classmates and my professors. While reading Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success I realized how destructive this attitude was to my success in classes. As far as my intelligence I had a very fixed mindset. As Dr. Dweck explains it a fixed mindset it believing that our attributes and abilities are fixed, not able to grow or diminish. She outlines that one symptom of having a fixed mindset is the fear of proving to yourself and others that you are not as great as you might appear to be or believe yourself to be. I never thought myself to be the smartest in a classroom, but I do hold the fear that someone might decide that I am not very smart due to a dumb question I asked or a concept I am not understanding. This resulted in my attitude of keeping to myself, a...

I approached my first semester ate ASU West much like I did when I was attending community college. I kept my head down, went to classes and stayed to myself. If I could go back and give myself some advice I would say to get involved early. There are a lot of opportunities outside of the classroom at the west campus. Teachers care about you and there are a lot of chances to network with professors that I am not taking classes with and with students from many other fields of study. I feel like I didn't utilize the strengths of the west campus to the fullest. There is a lot to benefit if you are willing to step a little outside of your comfort zone, such as research opportunities, mentor-ship from great professors and some really fun activities.

What do you like best/worst about being a professor?  "The best thing about being a professor is doing what I love the most -- teaching subjects that I am passionate about and mentoring students. I also love the part where I can open doors for my students to achieve things that they probably didn't think they could do.  The worst part are the activities and expectations associated with the job that take me away from doing those things."   Why did you decide to enter your field? "Because I had really good and really bad professors in college. The good ones inspired me to go into the field and be better. The bad ones made me realize that students deserve better teachers."    What is the most surprising thing about your field to you? "That we are in the business of educating first and foremost but not all professors like teaching or mentoring. That blows my mind."