Here's how you can utilize your academic background to jumpstart your career in creative problem solving.

My academic journey played a vital role in shaping me to be a more creative problem solver. Throughout my academics, I had an opportunity to see what results we gained by working individually and by working in groups. How your brain powers enhance each time you learn new things and invoke more power to think creatively and innovatively. Our year-end projects have provided me with an opportunity to identify a problem and solve it, this project not only gave me hope to be creative but the appreciation and suggestions I received helped me a lot to become a more creative problem solver. It improved my teamwork, communication, and networking capabilities while learning to be independent and stronger at some critical times.

If you are dying to identify your strengths, you will get them surely. You get them in your projects, assignments, term papers, and dissertations etc. Then recollect how did you succeed in making them world class. You will come to realise your critical awareness, your creativity in sampling, data-collection, analysing, interpreting your ability to synthesize, your ability to edit and proofread the draft. Naturally all these constitute your problem solving strategies. They matter a lot in Higher Education.

Critical thinking combined with a solid theoretical foundation and an open mindset towards paradigm shifts is what makes me the professional I am today. Never let your education limit you, whether in broad thinking or technical skills. Analytical abilities are always important, as is professional competence, which we usually build at the beginning of our academic careers. However, focus on "cultural diversity" and "philosophical thinking," even if your background is in hard physics. We are responsible for our own limitations.

I am from an Instrumentation Engineering background and I have a different approach to how I look at a problem and solve it, likewise, my friends from Computers, Electronics, etc have different approaches to the way they look at a problem and solve it. If these creative minds meet, discuss, and conclude identifying the right solutions to solve a problem would surely add wonders. When you work with creative minds you prepare well and always improve your knowledge to contribute more, which will further improve your ability to 1. Look at things from a 360-degree view. 2. Involve the first principal concepts. 3. Expand your horizons into other fields. 4. Out-of-the-box thinking. 5. You will enable lateral thinking in your approach.

Expanding your horizon is a pre-requisite of succeeding in Higher Education. This expansion happens in multiple ways, such as 1. To visit a library 2. To attend workshops, conferences, panel discussion, online classes, webinars etc 3. To explore multi-disciplinary subjects/areas 4. To explore AI and use it extensively to expand the horizon of higher education 5. To review academic and research papers, learned reports, and mass media scripts. Thereafter, arise, awake, and get ready to expand your horizons.

The comfort zone we usually create around ourselves when conditions allow is the greatest limiter of our evolution. Exploring areas and disciplines outside your basic training, including self-challenges, is very important. I have over 30 years of teaching experience, and yet I recently decided to learn Mandarin (and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done!). Know that there is a universe of magical doors beyond our comfort zone.

Collaborating does not necessarily mean an immediate gain. Similarly, saying "this is not my area of expertise" is essentially saying that you are not open to collaboration. Even when working with hard sciences, discussions with colleagues from the humanities and social sciences add an incredibly rich layer to my work, bringing interdisciplinary perspectives that would be unimaginable if I stayed within my own field. This collaborative attitude should always be associated with expanding your horizons and identifying your strengths and weaknesses.

As important as critical thinking is, self-criticism is equally vital. This process is not necessarily immediate or "on-the-fly", when you are focused on a problem solving. Critical analysis means stepping back from the problem to view it from different perspectives. Interestingly, this technique is highly applicable not only in scientific work but also in interpersonal relationships at work, with collaborators, in academia, and in many other areas. It requires time, organization, and above all, self-control, to ensure that emotions do not dominate your skills or hability of criticism and self-criticism.

Reflection is often an underutilized skill. I myself am guilty of being in such a rush to finish the project or task, that I often fail to evaluate what I learned for the next project or even the next time I do the task. There's a reason why almost every organization, including law enforcement and the entertainment industry, has a debriefing session after every major project. It's good to get clarification on what worked and what didn't, what surprises arose and what suspicions were confirmed, and most importantly how you felt while in the thick of things. Reflection should always be the last step before you put that checkmark in the done column.

Theories given by experts need to be applied in any project or research. To elaborate Stephen Krashen's ' Theory of Second Language Acquisition' may be applied in any classroom situation to know the validity of his theories. Likewise 'Behaviourism' may be tested to children as well as adults to know the merit of this theory. Further, there is no need to create a boundary between subjects or faculties. To illustrate, a scholarship of Humanities should not confine itself only to humanities but also to extend itself to Science, Commerce, Law or Medicine. Besides, can we limit the knowledge and application of AI to only one area or subject? So every theory or hypothesis needs to be tested for the benefit of community and nation.

Fear and excessive self-criticism are your greatest enemies. Creativity and a diverse set of skills are the strengths you need to translate theory into practice. However, combat fear and also fight against destructive criticism. Making mistakes, often many, is part of the problem-solving process.