Li 1

Chenkai Li

Professor Marie Webb

LING 12 section 700 and M/W 3:00 p.m.

3 Jun. 2019

Revised Action Plan Letter

 Li 2

April 22, 2019

HSSB 1233,
University of California Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, CA 93107

Dear Chenkai Li:

I hope you are enjoying your university life. Do you still remember Mr. He's teachings and
encouragement? It's not enough to only have an inner motivation or mentor in your mind. In
addition to inner motivation, a practical plan and some techniques will transform the untouchable
motivation into touchable success. Besides immersing in entertainment, I must alert you about
your practical plan to become an outstanding and successful data scientist. In other words, you
should realize the goal of studying abroad is not enjoying your life in the U.S. The mission of
getting to success by receiving a high-quality education at UCSB is the main task. To ensure you
are fighting toward the ultimate goal and not deviated by temptation, my plan includes merely
two primary directions - increasing the quality of learning and understanding and restricting the
undisciplined mind.

Increasing the quality of learning and restricting the undisciplined mind are like manipulating the
upper bound and lower bound of study quality. By adopting a time effective schedule and rest
method, the quality of learning and efficiency can be ensured. If you imagine a scale used to
measure the total academic achievement, manipulating the quality of learning is like control the
upper bound of the scale what is the best performance you can reach. On the other hand,
constraining an undisciplined mind is used to increase the lower bound of the scale, that
describes the minimum achievement you will get. If you save time from entertainment, you will
have more time to study the course materials; thus, you will hardly get a miserable grade at the
final. Jahren, a great scientist and the author of the famous book Lab Girl, says, "Rooting
exhausts the very last reserves of the seed. The gamble is everything and losing means death"
(52). Jahren states her thoughts about the rooting process of seeds as exhaustion and gambling
with a high probability of failure and death. Each student is like a seed. The youth is the period
when we extend our roots. If you don't save energy for studying and waste your reserves on
entertainment, you won't survive and will live a miserable life in the rest of your lives. To avoid
the result of losing everything, it's essential to adopt this two-sided plan to secure a successful
and bright future.

As one of the two steps to fulfill the goal of increasing the quality of learning, choosing a good
location for studying is the beginning step. In the past, you used to stay in the dorm and study. At
that moment, you thought the convenient access to materials provided by the dorm environment
exceeded the disadvantages, such as noisy neighbors and insufficient light. However, after one-
quarter of the experiment, you finally found your dorm is the worst place for studying. The
number one advantage, convenient access to materials, became the most significant problem that
triggered your laziness. As other course materials are closer to you, your cozy bed is closer to
you, too. Thus, you must stay in the library to finish daily work. The external environment may
 Li 3

produce some resistance, and a clean desk may help you focus on the materials in front of you.
Jahren states, “you can’t afford to have any part of the brain distracted from what you are doing
when each move you make is critical to both safety and success” (82). In other words, distraction
can deviate the designed path for experiment and cause dangers. For you, distractions may not
relate to safety, but it is closely connected to success. Choosing a place with few distractions can
guarantee the effectiveness of studying.

Furthermore, recording and summarizing your daily activities is essential to design a proper
study plan. Observation is the first step. When Jahren starts describing her experiment, she first
observed the seed of the hackberry tree before doing anything else (67). Only after careful
observation, Jahren can make guesses and designed her experiments. Concluding from Jahren’s
process of exploring the Hackberry tree, I can say that observation is one of the outstanding
characteristics of scientists. Observation can help you find the bad habits through tedious daily
work. Thus, it’s highly recommendable to start making your log book, recording when and
where you are and what you are doing. In your log book, you should record the time, the events
and the places. In addition to that, you can also include a progress bar of the time you spent on
studying. Just recording is not enough. You must analyze the log book and conclude the normal
activity pattern of your daily life to see which part is useless and ineffective. After identifying
the useless activity, the next step is to reorganize your time and create a personal-oriented
schedule without a meaningless waste of time. Most of the time, the distractions come from
yourself because of the lack of focus on current materials. To avoid losing focus, according to
my investigation on the internet, I suggest you adopt the Pomodoro time management method –
study 25 minutes and take a 5 minutes break. The Pomodoro time management method is highly
effective for students who want to study longer because it divides your study time into small
pieces that you can highly concentrate your focus on for 25 minutes. After, a 5-minute break will
restore your focus for the next 25 minutes.

To constrain your undisciplined mind, I give you two methods. First, restrict cell phone and
games in your life. Implementing the goal of restriction is easy. I know you use the iPhone.
Please turn on the screen time and set 1 minute for games and entertainment, then ask your
roommate to set a password. Thus, objectively, you will have no access to games and
entertainment. The whole process is like governing river water. Blocking access is building the
dam. However, building the dam is not going to solve the problem thoroughly. You need to
dredge the waterway. The core motivation that pushes you to play games and entertainment is
desire. How to decrease the power of your desire is the main issue. I suggest you regularly go to
the gym to use up the excess energy. When you are tired after a whole day of studying, the time
left for games and entertainment will shrink. Additionally, it's not healthy to always constrain
your desire. You should choose the proper time, such as the weekend, and play for a limited
time. Remember, the process of controlling your undisciplined mind may take a long time, but
just as Jahren says, "They found a daring plant that had made an unprecedented path of its own.
They found an acacia tree that had moved soil and rock, through years of dry failure until its
improbable success" (53). In other words, Jahren wants to indicate that unremitting efforts can
make a huge difference, such as a tree uses years of effort to create its path between the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea. You should act like the acacia tree. As time passes, even little
accumulation every day can form a path towards success for you.
 Li 4

In general, there are two main directions – increasing the quality of learning and restricting the
undisciplined mind. Each direction has two specific methods. For the increasing quality of
learning, two essential points are proper location and a time-effective schedule. For restricting
the undisciplined mind, setting screen time and constraining your desire are the keys to fulfill the
goal. If you can strictly follow the action plan, I believe you will become closer and closer to
your dream.

Sincerely,

Chenkai Li,
HSSB 1233,
University of California Santa Barbara,
Santa Barbara, CA 93107
 Li 5

Works Cited

Jahren, Hope. LAB GIRL. Vintage Books, March 2017.

“Pomodoro Technique.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 6 May 2019,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique.