Sarah Davies

Today’s interview is with Kelly Sutton. Kelly is currently a senior at Loyola Marymount University majoring in computer science and film production. Kelly started a lifehacking blog directed specifically at college students at HackCollege.com in August of 2006. He also performs improv comedy with the group Laser Squad Bravo. Kelly has two proposals up at this year’s sxsw: Using These Things Called Computers to Overhaul Universities and The New Entry Level. Anyone with internet access can vote for the proposals.

Sarah: You run a wildly successful blog at HackCollege.com. How do you balance the needs of readers who actually come to the site and readers who only read you through RSS?
Kelly: I would be a little hesitant to call us “wildly successful.” We’re doing pretty well for a hobby among a few students, but we aren’t getting book publishers knocking at our door… yet. We don’t particularly aim to balance the needs of the different types of readers. We do our best to create interesting and compelling content. We try to keep the focus on the content and not limit ourselves to one method of consumption; everyone likes their content delivered in a slightly different way.

Sarah: What are some common misconceptions about Generation Y people in the job market?
Kelly: There is a misconception that Generation Y people know online technologies better than anyone else. In fact, many of us might be more poorly equipped to handle social media. Sure, we understand its nuances, but we use social networks in a primarily social context. Hiring someone a young person to manage a corporate Facebook account is senseless to me. Just like any other PR endeavor, plenty of brute force and casting a wide net is still involved. Such techniques are not unique to my generation.

Sarah: What are some free or low-cost perks that employers can provide to retain and recruit Generation Y employees?
Kelly: Creating a stimulating workplace is the best way to retain Gen Y employees. We are spoiled: once we get bored, we move on. I’ve already held more jobs than my dad and I have yet to graduate college. (Once we start settling down, this may not be the case.) If a workplace is merely seen as “something to pay the bills,” no perk will retain that employee for very long. Encourage employees to tinker on their spare time and welcome new ideas.

Sarah: How has technology changed the college experience?
Kelly: Facebook changed the way colleges operate. Books can and are being written on the subject. It’s becoming more commonplace to start a conversation with, “Hey, I saw on Facebook that you did X last weekend” rather than ask, “So what’d you do this weekend?” College life is still adjusting to the dynamic of social networking.

Sarah: Can digital culture be taught? Or is it something that can only be learned through experience?
Kelly: Digital culture can definitely be taught through experience. You won’t learn how to play the guitar by reading a book about it; you learn by practicing day in and day out. Digital entities work the same way. The more experience a person has with a system, the better they will be with it. Generation Y has a leg up on our elders because we grew up playing computer games and surfing the Internet.

The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw. In Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications, I’ll be talking about how to connect with folks like Kelly, who care deeply about their communities, but also have very strong preferences over communication style. In Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy , I’ll explain why you need people like Kelly on your upper management team in order to keep up with an exponentially accelerating technology market. Please vote for those panels if you feel they would benefit the sxsw community. You can also vote for Kelly’s panels: Using These Things Called Computers to Overhaul Universities and The New Entry Level.

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Opening
My husband, Brian, and I have a child in Suzuki violin. We have a quirky way of practicing, and our violin teacher keeps telling us that we should tell other parents about it, because it really does work. So this blog post has nothing to do with technology (although it does have to do with lifehacking). It’s aimed at other Suzuki parents, so if you’re one of my normal blog readers and you have zero interest in music or motivating children, then move along. I’ll be back to my normally-scheduled tech blogging next week.

Suzuki is hard work
Learning an instrument is a life-long endeavor. It requires daily practice over a long period of time. If you’re like my husband and me, you’ve made the decision that it’s worth it. Our little one (I call her the geekling) is seven. She started Suzuki violin at the age of five, and she can’t remember a time when she didn’t practice every day. That’s hard work! However, our job as a parents isn’t to help her (or bribe or intimidate her to) struggle through the hard work. I’m going to tell you about the way we practice. It’s a lot of work for us. The difference is that we know we’re working hard. If all goes as planned, she thinks it’s playtime.

Trust your teacher
There’s a reason we hire teachers. Any violinist could tell a child the 1,001 things that they are doing wrong. Edmund Sprunger says in his great book, Helping Parents Practice, that his job as a violin teacher is to tell the child the one thing that will help them the most. A good violin teacher (ours is the fabulous Christine Dunaway) will tell you exactly what to practice at home. We, as parents, have a strong urge to correct our children. It’s hard to watch them practicing bad habits, but if the focus for the week is a good bow hand, let the other stuff slide. There are a lot of things to think about while playing an instrument, and trying to focus on them all at once will overwhelm you and your child. Your job as a parent is to practice what you’re told to practice. It’s a no-brainer.

Teach your child’s body
Suzuki is about repetition. It’s about muscles and neurons. Your child wants to be a great musician, and they want to perfectly execute everything you ask them to do. Telling your child “you’re just not trying, try harder” is incredibly demotivating. You and your child have the same goals, you just need to help her whip her body and her brain into shape. Try using body and brain terminology with your child. Saying “you’re having trouble with that fast spot in Allegro” is really different from saying “your fingers are having trouble with that fast spot in Allegro”. The latter is both more accurate and more productive. The problem isn’t that the geekling always forgets the c-sharp, the problem is that we need to work together on strengthening that neural pathway, because it sure is stubborn! Get it?

Motivation
Just like adults, children need a good reason to follow directions. I think we all know that “because I said so” isn’t a good reason. We quickly learn that our children think “because it will make you a great musician someday” isn’t a good reason. There is a very important difference between adults and children here. Adults want the real reason. Children want a reason. This is the really important really hard work you need to do: making stuff up. Here’s an excerpt from a recent practice I did with the geekling:

“oh no!”
“what’s wrong?”
“gremlins have just kidnapped the willow princess, and somebody has to go save her!”
“I’ll save her!”
“okay, they took her into a dark cave. you’re not afraid of the dark, right?”
“no way! what do I have to do?”
“there’s water in the cave, but fortunately there’s a rowboat. To row the boat, you need to play the first four measures of Perpetual Motion three times with a perfect bow hand, then we’ll get to see what’s at the end of the cave.”
“okay”
“get into a good play position, here we go!”

You get the idea. If she forgets about her bow hand, then we’ve lost an oar and we need to go back to the mouth of the cave and start over. We’ve done dinosaur hunts and rock concerts and even saved the world from global warming. Take whatever excites your child this week, and roll with it. If I’m having a lousy day, and not feeling particularly creative, we’ll use a book or a myth (The Ramayana works great) so I don’t have to make up the structure. The teacher tells us what to practice, the story provides the motivation, and all I have to do is put the two together.

It’s a totally flexible method too. If she’s doing great, or it’s taking longer than I expected, then a gryphon swoops in and flies us to the end of the cave. If I feel like a little more practice is necessary, then there’s a gnome at the end of the cave who needs us to row him to his brother’s place so we can all get scuba suits because the kidnappers went underwater. We also throw in a liberal dash of Choose Your Own Adventure, giving her two (or more) productive choices to turn the story in a certain direction. We always end the lesson on an incredible victory, and she’s happy to practice the next day.

Our child is particularly kinesthetic, so we also include activities like “you’ve been sprinkled with fairy dust. put down your violin and touch every doorknob in the house so the fairies can come in.” We’ll toss a coin to decide what to do, or have her collect 8 pencils by playing something eight times, but then actually let her get a pencil out of the drawer each time she plays it. If she’s extremely wiggly, we’ve even been known to have her run around the block in the middle of a lesson then come back and play.

Some people (like my husband) can do this sort of storytelling on the fly. I usually need some prep time to look over my lesson notes and form a story outline beforehand. Do what works for you.

In closing
I hope that helps. All my work is public domain, so feel free to share this with friends, copy it, publish it, whatever. I won’t sue you. I would appreciate if you keep my name attached and let me know if you liked it and where you’re passing it on. Good luck with practice!

A print-friendly version of this post is available at http://sarahdavies.cc/suzuki.html