When I enrolled in college, I believed that it would be the best place for me to continue to explore and expand my academic interests. I believed I would be entering an environment where I was encouraged to ask questions, where I had the opportunity to engage with peers who were working towards the same goals and where I would learn the tools to find the answers to my questions! I learned quickly that asking questions, even in a setting designed for education, is much more complicated than I initially thought.

I’ve heard multiple ways of dismissing a question in my academic career. There are questions that are too politically charged, questions that are irrelevant, questions for another time, questions that indicated I clearly hadn’t done the reading. There are research topics that can't be fully funded and theories of intellectual discovery that are out of fashion. There are questions that are too literal, those that are too abstract and questions that go in circles.

To a certain extent, this question hierarchy makes sense. Academics have to work under budget and time constraints to produce material that is deemed worthwhile. Government and private interest funding is purposefully allocated to tap into students as a resource for research, and with 25% more students enrolled in American universities and colleges in 2015 than there were 15 years earlier, professors have to prioritize class time and student attention somehow. Discouraging real question asking has unfortunately been a result of this.

In my experience, “good” students ask the questions their professors want the answer to, but exceptional student ask the questions they want the answers to. That might mean spending large amounts of time filling in background knowledge or working to connect material from one course to another. While both of these examples take significant time and effort and are examples of undeniably valuable intellectual engagement, neither will be immediately reflected in a student’s grades. Students who stick to “textbook questions,” buzzwords and formulaic ways of speaking, writing and thinking will see quantifiable and immediate results, despite the fact that they bore themselves and their professors.

Both strategies have their merits. Luckily, students with different question asking styles can be incredibly helpful to each other! The types of questions we ask can be very revealing about the ways our minds work. Students that can identify and can deliver what a professor is looking for help others solidify key concepts that will serve as building blocks for the rest of the course. Students that tend to lean in a more exploratory direction help other students to strengthen their understanding or connect ideas. And of course, putting your thought process into words to explain it someone else is a great study strategy.

If you're looking for more ways to practice intellectual empathy, read my article Exercising Intellectual Empathy 101!