Undergraduate student Leo completed a SLICC (Student-led, Individually-created Course) in the summer of 2017. Hear what he got from it .
Hey there! I’m Leo, a Biochemistry student and a 2017 SLICCs student. This post is about my experience and the principles I gained from it.
What’s so special about SLICCs?
SLICCs is a platform that allows students to design their own course. If this doesn’t already sound appealing to you, it may help knowing that any experience, ranging from visiting a foreign country, learning new recipes or building a robot, are all suitable as SLICC activities. These activities all have one thing in common: they will affect you as a person. SLICCs allows you to track the steps you take, to reflect upon them and consider alternative paths you could have taken to achieve your goals.
During my SLICC, I decided to learn a new programming language to create graphs of “biological relationships” for the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
I will avoid the technical details because the principles I acquired from it may be more valuable to you in your SLICC and generally your life. The main points are: mistakes, feedback and recording your experiences.
1 – Mistakes
Mistakes are a part of every learning activity. You will face numerous situations where either your skills are not adequate, or you won’t know how to move forward. Even if your project ends up being “terrible”, your SLICC will not necessarily be so. Infact, SLICCs encourages you to look back at these mistakes, understand how you could avoid them or how you should have approached situations differently.
Mistakes help you identify weaknesses and improve you as a person. The sooner you realize it, the more interesting your SLICC (and your life) will be.
2 – Feedback
In my SLICC, I identified that one of the main walls that prevented me to improve, was actually imposed by myself. When I produced my first code, it was criticized quite heavily by my supervisor. However, I focused more on the fact that someone was criticizing my work rather than the actual content of the critique.
I later learned to separate myself from my work, and look at it from a third-person’s point of view. When creating a product, it is crucial to consider different perspectives to guide the development of the product.
My mistakes were not being classified as such until I looked at my work from a different angle. Asking for feedback became a routine part of my internship, which significantly improved my skills.
3 – Recording your experiences
This is the most underestimated, yet arguably the most important aspect of SLICCs.
I learned to always look for shortcuts and ways to minimize the time I spend solving a problem. After all, time is the most valuable assets each of us has.
Through my SLICC I got in the habit of recording my experience and the way I solve a specific problem. This turned out to be efficient when encountering similar problems, or understanding why I had made specific decisions in the past. SLICCs offers an online platform, although I also found it useful having a physical notebook to write down my thinking process, as it is easier to bring to meetings (I also really liked the cover).
The most successful SLICCs (both experience-wise and grade-wise) have regularly written reflections. Your reflections don’t need to be essays, they may as well be pictures or a few sentences as long as they can be looked back on and have a concrete meaning.
At this point, I think you should have a general idea of what SLICC is about. You get to learn something new recognized by the university. I would totally recommend it!
Leo’s post is part of our Spring 2018 #ExperienceWorks campaign. Find a summary of the week’s messages here: www.ed.ac.uk/careers/wex
And a quick link to our information about SLICCs is here.
