S-STEM Scholar Todd Leavitt's Blog

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...