Preparing For School

It's just a couple weeks until school starts again for me and I've been wondering how to prepare myself for the sudden change. I like the idea of the brain as a muscle, so how do I get back in mental shape? Reading through encyclopedias as an exercise comes to mind, but I don't at the moment have the energy or capacity for that. More importantly, what I've learned in my first year of undergraduate science is that knowing how to not know things can be just as important as knowing a few certain facts. To put it differently, science is a tool for exploration rather than a big book of facts and theories. Every idea that science produces is a rough draft that is edited for years or centuries afterwards.

Now that I've gone on my high-flying discussion of the nature of science, it's time to come back down and admit that I might not know what I'm talking about. Let me end the thought with this: facts are very important, but focusing just on knowledge might be missing the forest for the trees. With all that in mind, how do I prepare for school? The first step is to get into the mindset of asking questions.