The value of working your butt off

I’m often asked, “What is advantage of the University of Michigan over other schools?” This question is hard to answer, because the real advantages are cultural and environmental.  Of course we can talk about amazing faculty at the forefront of their fields and we can talk about amazing facilities.  But these are just some of the conditions that create the UM advantage; they don’t define the advantage itself.  In the end, I think the essential value that the UM provides to undergraduate students is this: we make students work really hard.   The notion of hard work is in the air here, and no student will feel out of place spending 50 or 60 hours per week on serious intellectual work.

I’ve met successful students in many different majors, from engineering to art to history to neurobiology, and the common experience for these students is a packed day: packed with classes, study, student organization activity, or project teamwork.   Their major is secondary to their success: the development of an ethic for achievement and a willingness to put in the work necessary for that achievement is the primary driver. 

In an influential article Ericsson Anders, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Romer asserted the importance of deliberative practice and lots of it as the route to high achievement (Anders, Krampe and Tesch-Romer, “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance,” Psychological Review, Vol 100(3), Jul 1993, 363-406).   This work, and subsequent work by many researchers, has put the idea of the 10,000-hour rule into the mainstream.   The idea is that about 10,000 hours of deliberative practice are required to achieve true mastery in any field of endeavor.  The typical UM student will get about 60% of the way to that goal by the time the achieve their degree, and if they use the summer well they can pretty nearly achieve the 10,000 hour mark.

Not every school creates the environment in which hard deliberative practice is the norm.  The UM does it through the people we assemble: faculty, staff and students.  We create a community whose members have an intrinsic drive to develop mastery, and these role models and the demands that they make of each other encourage students to seek the same mastery.  Students who are already here become similar role models for new students, and the system is a self-renewing community in which the fun associated with true accomplishment pervades the culture.  So in the end, each student here will know and feel, deep in your bones, the value of working your butt off.