Many years ago, I was an undergraduate sitting in a large amphitheater at Boston University, waiting for my new psychology class to begin. The professor, Catherine Caldwell-Harris, bustled in and took the stage. She was younger than most of my other professors, and had a great deal of energy — it was infectious and almost dizzying. Students watched with wide eyes as she paced the stage, extolling the virtues of self-directed learning and passionately railing against doing work for work’s sake.
Rather than give specific assignments, she said that each of us would produce three projects — of our own design, on topics of our choice — that would become our “portfolio.” Back then, I was one of those stick-in-the-mud students who just wanted to know what I had to do to get my A, so naturally I found the idea of doing three … somethings … to be worryingly amorphous. I fretted for a while, and then got to work.
