“You are bright,” said Professor Raymond Yagle, my advisor, “but you need to speak up in class.” I had gone back to college after working for eight years, and this was his feedback during my first semester.
As some of our classes included class participation in the grades, this was valuable feedback.
This may have been the first honest personal feedback that I got — and I was already 30 years old!
Cultural Background: One would think that with four siblings, both older and younger, I would have got a lot of feedback. But growing up in India, personal feedback was frowned upon. If you said something nasty, someone may say — “that doesn’t reflect well on you.” But that was the extent.