What the Best College Students Do

Paul Baker taught theater at Baylor University and Trinity University in Texas, where he developed an innovative course in creativity, Integration of Abilities, that engaged students in new ways of thinking about knowledge, problems, and learning. At Baylor, he designed a theater whose stages surround an audience seated in swivel chairs. Integration of Abilities students also sat in these chairs, where they learned to examine creative challenges from the perspectives of line, space, motion, time, and silhouette. 

Internationally known for designing the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas, Sherry Kafka has “redesign[ed] cities, published a novel, made television documentaries, and worked on projects around the world” (13). A student of Paul Baker, Sherry learned in his college class how to loosen up her attitudes, look at her feelings from different perspectives, and think about ordinary things in new ways. Sherry credits that experience with expanding her ability to think widely and creatively. 

After growing up on a farm and enjoying a career in professional basketball, Will Allen founded Growing Power, a series of food centers located in Milwaukee, Chicago, and elsewhere that provide healthy food and teach local residents how to grow their own fresh food. By looking anew at the problems of how to provide healthful food in urban settings and how that process affects neighborhoods, Will developed a unique approach to the problem. His work earned him a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and the NCAA’s Theodore Roosevelt Award. Will credits basketball team-building as “the single most influential experience I had in college” (31). 

Before he became a CEO and co-inventor of the PalmPilot—the hand-held device that led to the smartphone—Jeff Hawkins spent his youth as an inveterate tinkerer. In college, he completed required courses, but his heart was in areas that fascinated him, and he pursued those studies with passion. Jeff developed four main questions that he wanted to answer: “why does anything exist? […] why do we have the particular laws of physics that we do? […] why do we have life, and what is its nature?” and “what’s the nature of intelligence?” (33). Jeff traded his work on hand-held technology to pursue that fourth question with his company Numenta, which studies the brain and adapts its principles to machine learning. 

A saxophone player in Beyoncé’s all-woman touring band, Tia didn’t take learning seriously until a bad grade in a Spelman College writing course inspired her to take command of her education. She planned her days meticulously, organized conversation groups, became fascinated with learning, practiced music six hours a day, graduated magna cum laude, got a master’s degree, cut an album, and joined Beyoncé’s band. Hers is a story of commitment, dedication, thoroughness, and passion. 

As a child, Mary Ann built miniature towns in the backyard and filled them with histories in which she and her sister would appear as characters. On vacations, her family traveled extensively. Books and artworks abounded at the house; Mary Ann learned ceramics, knitting, and math, and she read mysteries. Considered too wild and too poor at writing to amount to anything, Mary Ann excelled anyway and went to Harvard, where she studied Latin and theater design. During summers, she and her sister worked at orphanages in India and Somalia, where their understanding and sympathy for the vast range of human experience blossomed. She became a doctor, joined Doctors Without Borders, and spends several weeks a year treating impoverished or war-torn patients in many countries. Mary Ann exemplifies the deep-learning student who revisits her biases in the light of wide experience, takes an interest in a variety of field and skills, and combines knowledge in new and creative ways, adapting it to suit her particular strengths and unique approaches. 

An avid reader as a youth but a mediocre student, David Protess came into his own at Roosevelt University, where the issues of the day were discussed and debated carefully and thoroughly in classrooms and after hours. He thrived on debate and testing ideas, and he became an investigator of judicial injustices, teaching the skill at Northwestern University. There, he collected students into study groups that examined evidence against convicted murderers, finding flaws that led to several death-row reversals.

David later formed the Chicago Innocence Project, which has furthered the work “to investigate cases in which prisoners may have been convicted of crimes they did not commit” (144). Some freed prisoners have become workers for the Project. David’s dedication and ability to think and see issues from an outside perspective led to the abolishment of Illinois’s death penalty and won him the Puffin Prize for creative citizenship. 

Eliza and her sister felt the intense pressure on Asian American women to succeed, and they were both high achievers in high school. At Columbia, Eliza discovered a deeper love for learning, and she became fascinated with power relationships in society. When her sister, overwhelmed by pressure, committed suicide, Eliza embarked on a years-long quest to understand the forces that crushed her sister’s will to live. She got a PhD in ethnic studies from the University of California at Berkeley and has since done important work on the topic. Eliza credits her ability to recover from her sister’s death to her seeing it in its larger social context. 

Growing up impoverished, Duncan learned on the streets, and his creative use of limited resources would serve him later. Duncan’s lifelong love of learning, plus a yen for solving puzzles, led him to study hard, earn a law degree and a CPA, build an investment firm that made him rich, and use the wealth to start Friends of the Children, whose professionals mentor emotionally troubled poor children and support their progress through their school years. The organization’s success rate garnered Duncan a Purpose Award. 

Liz grew up in Milwaukee, where her activist father instilled in her a love for political justice. In college, Liz took innovative courses—independent study, improvisation, and others—that helped her develop new types of choreography. Combining dance, science, history, and politics, Liz “became one of the most celebrated and innovative choreographers in American theater” (21).