“What causes global warming?” my middle-school English teacher asked.
My hand shot up.
“COW 🐄 FARTS 💨,” thirteen-year-old me said proudly. The answer was true enough, and funny (or so I thought). The perfect answer for the class clown I was then.
Laughter rippled across the room. For a second, I basked in it, a tiny rush of approval. Then the air shifted. My teacher’s face stiffened. She made me stand in the back of the room and handed me a white slip—a notice of punishment, though I forget now what the system of consequences actually was. What I do remember is the sharp humiliation of being singled out and the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead as everyone turned to look.
It wasn’t the first time school in Taiwan had felt like that. We moved back to Taiwan from Indiana when I was eight. My classmates in elementary school teased me for the way I spoke English and Chinese—both sounded too foreign—and a few teachers asked me to raise my hand less often. They would write in my daily “contact book” (聯絡簿 / lián luò bù), which travels between parents and teachers, that I tried to speak up in class too much. In the U.S., participation was a sign of curiosity and engagement. In Taiwan, it was a disruption.
By middle school—braces on, self-consciousness in full swing—I’d finally absorbed that message. When I finally had a teacher who encouraged us to speak up, my heart would thud, my palms would sweat, and my mouth refused to open.
What if my comment is dumb?
Haven’t you learned? Raise your hand less.
I rehearsed sentences in my head, but they stayed there. Each class, I told myself this time would be different, but each time, I stayed silent. The teacher warned she’d drop me if I stayed quiet. Eventually, I broke through, but I don’t know why it took so much effort and courage for me to do something effortless for my younger self.
Going to college in America reset everything. Asking questions wasn’t just allowed; it was expected. Friends lingered after lectures, walking professors back to their offices just to ask a few more questions. I joined them and started asking questions of my own.
I realize that before this mindset shift, I had been subconsciously treating questions like tests I could pass or fail, as if every query had a single correct phrasing and asking one the wrong way proved I didn’t belong. But that’s not what questions are. A question is an invitation to think together. After all, no one is expected to know everything, not even the professor, and certainly not the student.
Part of the difference in how easy it felt to ask questions in college compared to middle school was the culture change that came with moving from Taiwan back to America. Another part of it was just getting older and realizing people don’t think about you nearly as much as you think they do. I learned the same lesson in the gym. At first, I worried I looked ridiculous trying a new exercise. Then I noticed everyone else was too busy counting their own reps to care, and there’s no better way to learn how a lift feels and if it feels right for you than to do it yourself. Five seconds of looking dumb is a small price to pay for progress.
Questions work the same way: each one you raise could save an hour of silent Googling later, especially when you’re standing in front of someone with decades of experience in the field you’re trying to learn more about. Take advantage of their expertise. A live conversation with them could draw out angles you might not reach alone. Once, after class, I floated a half-baked thought to my professor: could there be a PROTAC-like drug for RNA? In other words, is there a medicine that, like a PROTAC (a molecule that tags unwanted proteins for destruction) instead tags RNA for destruction? The professor paused, then offered a handful of examples I’d never heard of and pointed me to relevant papers describing how researchers are trying something similar, though with different molecular machinery. That short exchange opened a whole field I didn’t know existed.
Sure, I could have Googled the question and eventually found some of those papers. But asking in the moment let the professor highlight which directions were worth chasing and turned a dry search term into a live conversation. One counterweight worth keeping in mind, though, is to aim to ask informed questions—ones that show you’ve done some basic homework. Trying to strike this balance signals respect for the other person’s time and makes the exchange richer for both of you since you can now test and extend what you know instead of gathering simple definitions and straightforward facts. It’s good to keep this in mind, but there’s no objective way to know when you’ve struck that balance, so don’t worry about it too much.
Either way, if there’s something you care about, comment and ask the question while it’s alive, even if it’s somewhat half-formed or seems obvious. A few seconds of risk can compress hours of aimless searching into a map drawn by someone who’s already walked the terrain. And a quick map from someone who’s been there doesn’t have to fence you in; it just shows where the paths start, so you can still explore the terrain yourself.
The last thing that helped make asking questions much easier was that by the time I reached my third year of college, I genuinely loved all my classes, including ones on gene editing, drug delivery, and molecular endocrinology (this class was 50% endocrinology and 50% how to think like a scientist). I looked forward to every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Not only would I get to catch up with friends from those classes, but what I learned in lecture also directly fed into the research I was doing in the lab, and the lab in turn made the lectures more vivid.
I began to notice how much stronger learning felt when it was driven from the inside out. Instead of memorizing facts for an exam, I was tracing connections, building a map that kept expanding. The more I followed those threads, the more natural it felt to speak up, because the questions belonged both to the project I was a part of in the lab and to an even larger, ever-expanding project of understanding how the world works.
***
Recently, I heard from a Taiwanese student who’s now attending graduate school in Boston. She told me she still isn’t used to speaking in class. Back in her university in Taiwan, she said, if a professor posed a question, the room would stay silent, and that was the norm. Keep your head down; that was enough, and that was the expectation. Here, she has to unlearn that habit, and she’s doing it in a second language, which makes things even harder. Her anecdote and my own experience are limited to Taiwan, but I wonder if classrooms in other countries have the same quiet built in.
These days, I usually ask what I want to ask and make the comments I want to make. Each time I raise my hand, I’m reclaiming the impulse that once got me in trouble. The quick leap toward understanding is worth every (potential) sideways glance.