Intuition

Intuition is a term that one of my college math professors would use often while teaching. He would say he was attempting to get us to develop an intuition about a certain theorem or set of problems that we were solving. When you have this intuition, you start to more instinctually know how to solve problems rather than thinking out what the best path to take is and why. I’ve come to see how important this intuition really is and also how strange it is that we as humans can really develop such intuition about such complex things.

Intuition comes largely with experience. When you’ve dealt with a particular subject enough times, you can start relating different versions of it back to what you’ve seen. This relation gives you the ability to take what seems like educated guesses. However, because of your experience, your guess can very likely be a very good answer to a problem. It’s that realization that really gives me confidence in something because it makes me realize that what might have felt like a guess wasn’t really a guess at all.

The other thing about intuition is that different people develop it at different speeds and are limited in how far their intuition can be developed in different fields. For instance, in my math classes, a couple of them were very difficult for me. Discrete geometry was one of the hardest classes I’ve ever taken. My ability to develop intuition about anything I was being taught was simply not there. I struggled through every test, not really ever quite understanding the material. Now, I could have studied hard and developed that intuition, but time constraints and willpower put a damper on that plan. On the other hand, there were students in the class who just immediately picked up the material and said, “I understand this, I can solve all of these problems easily.” Whether they had to do a lot of work to reach that point, I can only stipulate, but the point is they reached it and I couldn’t.

Do I feel envious at all? Not in the least, simply because I know I can develop a stronger intuition about other things faster so I will focus on those more. I ended up doing alright in the class, but it was an uphill struggle the whole time. It makes me realize just how tough a master’s program is going to be for me. There is master’s level work that I have done for my bachelor’s degree, but there is going to be the really tough stuff that I am going to have to really buckle down and study hard for. The thing is though that I wouldn’t be on such a tight schedule for whatever game I was working on at DigiPen, so I would have time to devote to classes. The idea that I will have both the will to work hard and the time to study for classes gives me confidence that I would do well in a graduate program.