I’m writing this to you, my fellow instructors, because I know that a lot of you (though certainly not all) normally don

I was excited when I got my first major dev task: refactoring a feature to use MVVM and be written in Kotlin. However, I wasn’t experienced enough to know how to properly test my own code, and so I sent it to be merged into master while it was buggy as hell. A couple of days later, the testers on my team were in a furor and I had a flood of bugs to fix for two straight weeks. I was holding the team back because I was too lazy to properly test my work, and since all my changes were merged, there was a real possibility that the next release was going to be delayed.

One thing is constant whenever anyone starts something new: inertia. We all experience it in many ways. When we need to get out of bed, our body behaves like an unresponsive blob. When we want to learn something new, we can’t get ourselves to join a course. When we want to diet, we get bogged down in the details of what we should eat, how often, etc.

2. Don’t go into this hoping to raise your scores. I have no idea if talking to students will mean higher numbers for you. My evidence is anecdotal. I haven’t conducted a scientific study on this. If you know of one, please share it with me! More than that, I think it’s a good idea to not go into a conversation about evals with a “gaming the system” mentality, as problematic as the system is. Go into it with a commitment to transparency and don’t focus on the numbers. Yes, the numbers are important and many careers depend on them. The long game is to change how the university assesses us. It shouldn’t be to bump up our scores.

“First impressions…are tightly connected with the enduring biases subjects bring along,” write Schiller et al in their 2009 study on a neural mechanism of first impressions.

They describe how simply focusing on positive words can cause short- and long-term changes in our frontal lobe, while negative, fear-inducing words increase activity in our amygdala, the fear center of our brains.

I then realised that if I had used a separate feature branch and then handed it to the testers, I would have saved myself and the team a ton of energy and time. Always aim to keep new code on a separate branch as long as possible until it’s been thoroughly tested. This will allow you to make fixes faster and isolate fatal bugs from production builds.

It sounds so straightforward, but most of us are shockingly casual with our language, especially when meeting someone new for the first time. It’s scary and stressful for most of us, which can cause us to word-vomit anything that comes to mind. If you choose to talk about anything stressful (which is easy now — we’ve got the pandemic, the election, the weather events, and the increasing price of chocolate all top of mind) you might accidentally shove someone else’s brain into a spiral of stress, which will cause them to think less positively of you.

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, the meadows near Andrés’ home in Ubrique, in Andalucia, Spain, are bright with flowers, such as these sweet-scented sulla vetches. Andrés had walked there a few days earlier and seen European stonechats hunting for insects, but they were on the far side of the meadow. Andrés asked his dad to drive to the meadow and park so he could use the car as a hide, kneel on the back seat and, with his lens on the window sill, shoot through the open windows. He was delighted to see stonechats flying close by, alighting on any stem or stalk as a vantage point to look for worms, spiders and insects.

Luckily, the benefit of having monkey brains that often let us down when we most need them is that they’re relatively easy to hack. You can train yourself to remember people’s names, for example, by using some simple mnemonic devices. You can subtly influence your own actions and those of others with material priming. And you can learn to make better first impressions just by changing the language you use.

In software development, the inertia/resistance involved in starting to create a new feature usually manifests itself in a number of ways: having to go through lengthy SDK documentation, understanding what exactly the business requirements are, or even trying to figure out which dependencies are needed.

Imagine if you knew exactly how to introduce yourself in a way that would leave an amazing first impression. It’s the kind of minor change that could have serious ramifications on the rest of your life — after all, first impressions count more than any future impressions you’ll make in a relationship.

The problem, as a lot of us will recognize, is that when humans get put under any kind of pressure conversationally, we don’t tend to make good impressions. We’re prone to talking too much about ourselves and forgetting the names of those we speak with.

Authors Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman tell us that “…a single word has the power to influence the expression of genes that regulate physical and emotional stress,” in their book Words Can Change Your Brain. That’s a lot of responsibility for just some words.

1. Get out of your head the idea that you shouldn’t do this. Students fill out course evaluations too many times in their college career to not know why they’re doing this and what impact it has on their campus community. I teach a lot of first-year students and I see it as my duty to help them navigate institutions and transfer their critical thinking to everything that they do at the university and beyond. Related to this, I believe in transparency. There are things that we know but our students don’t know. It’s our job to share that knowledge so students can be as mindful as possible in their engagement with the university as an institution and system. Talking to students about evals is about transparency. There is no social justice on a college campus without institutional transparency.

Another study in 2009, conducted by Maria Richter et al, described similar results. They explain that the presence of negative words like “disgusting,” “grueling,” and “dirty,” cause stress in the moment as well as contributing to long-term anxiety. Positive words, like “refreshing,” “celestial,” and “warming,” conversely, decrease the expression of stress hormones.