How to Cultivate Your Curiosity

Today we’re going to learn an advanced technique (that is: optional!) for demonstrating interest in (pandering to) a university we want to be admitted to without leaving home, reversing that technique to find more universities to be interested in, and recording this work to make our essay writing more efficient for the next several years. This is a great way to find future mentors, to identify under-marketed opportunities at colleges you might otherwise overlook, and sharpen your intellectual acuity even if you failed to get your summer plans together.

TLDR

• A good university for you will be proudly producing research that you find interesting.
• The bibliography on a research paper will help you find more researchers at other universities who are doing related work.
• Using a reference management tool like Zotero will help you remember and properly cite the core parts of what you learn.

Preamble: What is Curiosity? 🤔

Curiosity is the opposite of ignorance. Ignorance protects the constructed order of our ego by ignoring facts or truths that could disrupt it. Curiosity would rather risk that disruption over and over for the sake of developing a more resilient ego or, as Foucault described it, “a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it…”

Intellectual curiosity is important for your college application because your future university wants to know that you will be a curious student in the courses you are taking, not just an ignorant customer of the classes you are attending.

If you are not even sure what to be curious about, consider the courses you are taking now in high school where the teacher moves swiftly from shallow claim to shallow claim, either unwilling or unable to address even the most-obvious of flaws or gaps in their assertions. The curious path into college and your authentic interests is the one that starts by wanting to sink more time and attention into the places that most other people would prefer to glide past. Curiosity is the investment of attention to what one is, explicitly or implicitly, told to ignore.

Lauren Valdez writes that you will have found an authentic interest when “you find yourself forgetting to check your phone and research papers start reading like mystery novels you can’t put down,” but we need to right-size this to where you are at and the undergraduate admissions process that is your immediate next step.

Part 1: The Practice of Pandering

Step 1: Get your university, either one you already are keen on or from the “best universities for [my preferred major]” list Google will spit out.

Step 2: On the university’s website, do one of the following (or a combination of the following):

• Find where they’re bragging about their research or “faculty excellence” chops (probably under “academics”)
• Find their press releases or “newsroom” section (it might be a “blog”); these are often linked in the footer of page, see example screenshot below.
• Find the specific sub-school/department website that you care about and dig into their faculty directory or specific newsroom from there (as I did).

Special: Some universities or departments may also be posting press releases to their LinkedIn profile, so look there if you are having trouble finding them on the main web site.

For example: here is an article from Dr. Stelmaszak Rosa in the news feed from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (note the “/news/” in the page address). The content of this blurb gives us a good feel for whether or not we should care about this specific research—we’ll say, for the sake of the example, that we do because algorithms falling back to human mediation entertains me—and it very conveniently links to it (currently open-access).

The trick with academic papers is that you’re not expected to just sit down and read them straight through, especially not when you’re not even in college yet.  Here is the reading process Brown University recommends, and here is what the NIH recommends. What I recommend is:

1. read the abstract, 
2. read the intro until it drags, 
3. skip to the conclusion and discussion section at the end, 
4. and only then decide if the methodology in the middle is worth your time to rigorously review. 

Bless you if you’re interested enough to do that work, but mostly we just wanted to vibe-check the research to see if it was interesting to you. And we do this so that when you schedule a visitation to the campus you can ask: 

“Would it be possible to meet Dr. So-and-So? My curiosity was piqued by their paper on This-and-That and I’d love to know where they’re taking that research next!”

And when you’re writing a supplemental essay—especially the university’s “Why Us?” essay—this turns into:

“The work that Dr. So-and-So is doing on This-and-That seems like it will have profound implications for my interest in The-Other-Thing so my best opportunity to pursue my current passion is studying under them with the relevant support and resources of your institution.”

This boosts your rating for this university in 3 ways: 

1. It helps indicate that you can keep up with the academic rigor of the university because you’re actively engaging with the material that a professor is producing. 
2. It shows that you will take initiative to feed your intellectual curiosity, both of which are qualities that admissions is looking for more of in their academic students. 
3. Finally, and this is of proportional importance with the selectivity of the admissions process, it shows that you’ve done the work to cultivate care about their school and their staff already which makes it look like (A) you are more likely to accept an offer of admission from them and (B) will then be a nerdy little delight to all of the increasingly disillusioned and burnt-out professors who really need to see their teaching doing some sort of good in the world—both of which indicate that you are going to make the job of administrating the university easier for the admissions folks reviewing your file. 

I realize that is not what you said, but that is what they read. 😉

But wait, there’s more!

Part 2: Find the Next Competitive University

We will now use the easiest research trick I picked up in grad school (inadvertently from the also delightful Dr. Wendy Chun who chastised people for citing papers without reading them) and it is to dig through the bibliography of the paper you skimmed and trace its sources. Looking back at our example “When Algorithms Delegate to Humans” paper, you can see that it is thick with source citations even from the first sentence of the introduction. In this web-friendly rendering they show up as clickable links that then also link to their sources (yay!) but more traditionally the bibliography at the end could run for 30% or so of the paper’s total length to cite prior work.

So here’s what we do: grab a reference that looks interesting to you, open it up, give it a cursory read using the methodology previously described and then—if you like it—track that author back to their university. So, using the Baird & Maruping 2021 citation (screenshot above), we crack open that paper with the link provided and (presuming we also like this paper for the sake of our example) we can track Baird down. The article indicates that he was at Georgia State University but that was when it was published! So we’re going to go put “author:\“Aaron Baird\”” (see screenshot below) into Google Scholar (which is not the normal Google search), see that he has a profile in Google Scholar, and is at Colorado State now.

Note: a lot of the research that Google Scholar links to is paywalled. One of the best things about being a university student is that your library will likely have institutional subscriptions to get you past that paywall. But for right now, be watching for links to the right of the main listing: those are usually free-access copies of the paywalled material.

Despite its prevalence in this space, Google Scholar has been in decline lately. Valdez recommends using alternatives Elicit.com (I have not tried it) or SemanticScholar.org (gave me a good result) if Google Scholar is failing to meet your needs.

So with that little exercise, starting from the college and department you are curious about, we got you two scholars to follow on LinkedIn, another college to consider for your college list, and two scholarly articles you can cite when nerding out on your current fixation. And there is still plenty more bibliography to chew through even just on that first paper you were reading.

What if you do not have a potential college to even start from? Consider cross-referencing influencer trends on one of these academic research search engines as suggested by this influencer on Instagram. You may need a few tries to get to a paper worth reading, but once you find one you can start recording authors and their affiliated universities from there.

But how will you ever remember any of what you’re reading?

Part 3: Boost Your Research Prowess with Zotero

Allow me to introduce my dear friend, Zotero: https://www.zotero.org

Zotero is the grad school level tool we should have had much earlier. It is how you can build out a core block of citable resources and you—even/especially as high schoolers—are going to love it because it allows you to generate citations in like 14 different formats inclusive of APA, MLA, and Chicago. Let me restate that: Zotero will solve almost all of your bibliography-formatting problems from now through grad school.

It works like this:

1. Install it.
2. Register your account.
3. Now you can import PDFs (drag & drop) or “Add item by identifier” like DOI (as seen at the top of those papers and journal articles) or ISBN (as seen on books that Amazon or Powells has for sale). Urls probably work too for news articles (but I regard those as too volatile for my purposes).
4. And arrange these important citation materials into relevantly-named folders so that they don’t become an incoherent mess for you over time.
5. And “Add Item Note” where you can either copy direct quotes of blazing relevance from the source material, or fill in your abstraction/paraphrase, or simply put in your flavor-commentary.
   • If you are doing particularly focused or specific research, I recommend making an starter template that you can fill in as a note for each paper. For example, if making notes about clinical trials, consistently starting with a note that identifies Disease Context, Experimentation Methods, Findings, and Gaps will accelerate your future literature review.
6. And finally (for our purposes): right click on the title to “Create Bibliography from Item” to generate the citation in the format you need directly on your computer’s clipboard ready to be pasted into your paper (or class discussion board).

If you want to see this in action, here’s a video tutorial that I’m confident in recommending.

And now you’ve started building up a ready repository of materials that you can parlor-trick into your essays et cetera when certain topics keep on coming up. (Really, in grad school I was citing “Arendt, H. (with Applebaum, A.). (2024). The origins of totalitarianism (First Mariner Classics edition). Mariner Classics.” or “Foucault, M. (2020). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Penguin Classics.” every single week — having Zotero would’ve saved me 100 hours easily.)

I’m reading a physical book, how does Zotero help me? 

Use the ISBN of the book to get the book’s reference metadata in Zotero. When you find something in the book you like, use your camera phone to take a picture of the page, then use your photo service (Apple or Google I expect) to automatically OCR [Optical Character Recognition] the words on the page you photographed so you can copy and paste them into a Zotero item note. Don’t forget to include the page number(s)!

How can I seem more nerdy without actually reading books?

Your library has a lot of great books available as both audiobooks and ebooks. Check the audiobook and ebook out at the same time. Listen to the audiobook and when something particularly salient comes up, pause your listening and jump to that part of the ebook to copy the relevant text from the ebook into Zotero (or at least study it down to an abstracted level for methodological purposes).  For the most of you who are in Washington County (Oregon), here’s my local library’s Libby app page to get looped in to those materials.

Closing Thoughts

So that’s how you can dig through research that universities are producing to find out if you like where they’re going, or dig through research to find the universities with faculty that are producing the sorts of things that are interesting to you.

It is entirely possible that you will find papers that are stupefyingly boring to you. This is also valuable feedback! It’s a clear warning that one or more of the researcher, the university, or the subject matter would not be conducive to your growth and would be an ineffective way to invest your educational time and money. It’s not a sign to stop this process, it’s a sign to restart it with something else or somewhere else until we discover a valid combination — the sort of researcher, the kind of university, the relevant subject matter — that does pique your curiosity and demonstrates your interest in their work of tomorrow.