Posts

Resilience, Perseverance and Grit

Resilience is viewed as an ability to bounce back after failure or adversity. Well, I see resilience as not necessary to just bounce back after getting hit, but a quality that keep one to always seek higher standard to improve. The reason for being able to bounce back is because of the flexibility. Failure or adversity does not happen every day; however, the quality of resilience determines how one finds ways to go through each day by acting, adapting, and adjusting. Those who have the quality of resilience keep going.         I often wonder whether to keep going is the fate of all humans on earth, which is an inevitable act for living. The Bible has the story of Exodus, which is often used as an analogy describing not to settle as slaves but to going on a journey to the promise land, and in the process to have faith that God will deliver us there. It is true that only when we get up and go or do, we can have the chance to see wonders and achieve goals. If we just settle, it is static

Interpersonal Skills

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Interpersonal skills represent one’s ability to work with others for the best outcomes in work. When working with others, we should encounter collaboration, the share of duties, tasks and responsibilities; when working with others, we may encounter conflicts because we do not always agree with each other; when working with others, we need to exchange information, i.e. communication for everyone being on the same page, planning and proceeding with what we do and receiving feedbacks. This is just a brief view about what is like when working with others. Working with others is a common practice in human’s world and working with others is truly one of best practices for work to be done. For this matter, we should learn to work with others, and make the experience pleasant, productive and efficient.    From workplace and employment resources, the interpersonal skills include the skills, such as active listening, empathy, positive attitude, clear communication, sharing, cooperating, and resp

Person-Environment Fit

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Person-environment fit theories describe how the relationship of individuals and their environments affect work performance or relevant work/life satisfactions.  John Holland's (1985) Theory of Career Choice (RIASEC) classifies people into six personality types: realistic (R), investigative (I), artistic (A), social (S), enterprising (E), and conventional (C); and postulates that in choosing a career, people would like to work in an environment that are compatible to their personality type.   The Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA, 1984), also referred as the Person-Environment Correspondence (P-E-C) Theory, proposes that workers will continue to adjust themselves (such as knowledge, skill, attitude, or behavior) and the work environment to achieve the workplace professional equilibrium (such as fulfillment or job satisfaction). TWA summarizes six key work values: achievement, comfort, status, altruism, safety and autonomy, which determine the satisfaction levels of a worker when doing

Conditions of Engagement

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  Engagement is a critical topic in education and in workplace. It is relevant to learning and working performance, and it is important for sustaining wellbeing. The question is how to make us engaged. In this post, I want to explore the factors that can affect the engagement. Well it is only from my empirical perceptions.   Below are the factors that I think would affect engagement. Calling is from the spiritual realm, represented as the meaningfulness one views and a drive (energy) that leads people to pursue that meaningfulness. There are proposed conceptual definitions of calling, and Duffy et al proposed a theoretical model of calling – the Work as Calling Theory . Calling promotes engagement because the meaningfulness people view with that calling. This meaningfulness is most likely intrinsic, in values and righteousness.   Efficacy refers to one’s beliefs in one’s capability to execute behaviors necessary produce expected outcomes. Efficacy beliefs include self-eff

A Case Study: US Medical School Enrollment

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In my previous post, US Graduate Enrollment , I did some analysis about US graduate school enrollment. The motive to do that is to understand the problematic issues in graduate school, such as graduate student mental health issue and career pursue and outcome issues. In my precious analysis, the graduate fields of study do not include professional programs, such as law and medicine. It is worth to do a compare. The US medical school enrollment increased about 45% from 1980 to 2021, as the enrollment of  2021 is about 95,000 (Figure 1). The US medical school enrollment data were extracted from the Association of American Medical College (AAMC), FACTS . The increase rate in US medical school enrollment is less than the rates of US undergraduate enrollment and graduate school enrollment. Over the years, 1980-2021, the peak of US undergraduate enrollment was in 2010, reached 18 millions, which was 73% more than the undergraduate enrollment in 1980. The US graduate enrollment was about 700,

The Construction of Experience

I think to experience something is easy, just be some place, see something, taste something, touch something... We use our senses to experience things, and then what that experience leave to us? Things we experienced leave something in us. What we see, hear and feel, where we have been only last for a short of period of time, and then are gone. What have left in us from those experience are ours.   From the APA dictionary , experience is defined as 1. an event that is actually lived through, as opposed to one that is imagined or thought about; 2. the present content of consciousness; 3. a stimulus that has resulted in learning. Going through life, we have experienced many things. Through those experiences, we may become more knowledgable and wiser. The lessons learned from our experience may let us not make the same mistake again. Through our experience, we may become calmer and slow to act, just like things may not be that interesting and exciting any more. Event cognition, i.e. how p

The Uncertainty: Validity and Reliability

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Uncertainty is an issue we have to deal with in scientific measurements. Science are methods for effectively and efficiently doing things. This sounds great. However, scientific methods are always improving, can never be perfect.    The uncertainty principal in physics states that it is impossible to measure or calculate the position and the momentum of a quantum particle with absolute precision. There is always some degree of uncertainty, and the more the position of the particle is determine, the less is known about the speed of the particle, and vice versa. This uncertainty is set in the quantum mechanics world, dealing with the smallest scales of nature, quantum particles, such as atoms and subatoms.    The uncertainty in measurement in our physical world, the world we see around us, addresses that the measurement we determine cannot be exactly the true value of the object we measure. There is always some difference between the measurement and the true value. We use accuracy to des