Critical thinking is also creative thinking – that is my take from both my educational and professional experience. During the mid stages of my educational experience I was in a group of 4 programmers whose study project was to build hotel management software from scratch. Of course with this kind of responsibility comes lots of conflicts. Everyone was polite in the group but just beneath the surface in most of our meetings I realized there are struggles for turf and power. Even though I was the project leader chosen randomly by our instructor, still I noticed that good ideas were attacked and destroyed even before they were understood. Useful and time saving thoughts were prematurely cut off by interruptions. Most of what was happening in those meetings was a colossal waste of time and energy. I then realized the need for critical thinking.
It became obvious when I entered the workforce. As a result I took the following educational courses to provide me with required background to handle real world challenges involving critical thinking:
- Critical Thinking: This course introduced informal logic and critical thinking. I learned to identify standard errors in reasoning and apply these skills to contemporary readings and other forms of media representation.
- Psychology as a science: This course assisted to understand human psychology.
- Business & Professional Ethics: Assisted understanding what is good and bad morally both in personal and professional life.
- Organizational behavior: This course provided an introduction to the study of people and groups in organizations. Topics included personality, learning, work motivation, job attitudes, group dynamics and leadership.
These entire courses through out my educational experiences also have contributed towards my critical thinking ability. I realized no one can learn everything from some text books. Educational institutions are not there to make you read and learn everything from books but they are there to assist you in how to learn and apply your learning in real life. Thinking back, all my courses whether it is pre-calculus or marketing or human resources management or UNIX, all of the courses contributed at some level towards my learning critical thinking ability.
Some of critical thinking and creativity that went along with this can be found through out my professional achievements. Some of the most recent critical and creative thinking examples include the followings:
- Implementation of Online Assessment for Northern Medical Program’s Students.
- Implementation of Licentiate of the Medical Council of Canada (LMCC) exam.
- Implementation of Symantec Ghost Server.
- Implementing group policies and scripting to map network drives for staff/faculty and students.
I also understand this process is never ending. As a result I am continuously upgrading myself through different educational courses which I am applying towards my professional achievements.
Our project, indicated earlier in this section, was a success at the end by the way and we scored high marks in the class.