What did my psychology professor mean when she said that I am good at thinking out of the box?

It was/is a compliment.
Usually.
It means you’re an original thinker, and that you can find solutions to problems, in a unconventional or unique way.

NASA, The JPL, and many companies that work on super important things, often like to have highly educated people, but they can see the benefits of having people who are not “trained to think in certain ways.”

It’s just that you are not limited, by any preconceived notions or implanted knowledge. Highly trained and educated people, are often slaves to the type of thinking that they were taught in hundreds of labs, and universities. And so, something that might click, with someone like you, and seem obvious, it was never an option for the person stuck in their “box.”

Like political bias.
People get caught in a certain type of thinking. And then see everything though that self gratifying prism.

Have you ever watched “Sling Blade?” There is a famous scene, where a bunch if lawnmower repairmen are all confounded with not knowing what is wrong with a lawnmower that a customer brought in to have fixed.
As these competent people are all scratching their heads, the main character (played by Billy Bob Thornton) who is also mentally impaired walks up and assesses the mower. He checks the fuel reservoir and says that catcht phrase “there ain’t no gas, in it.”
Which did turn out to be the problem. Billy Bob’s character may not have been the smartest man, but he looked at things differently, and that is an advantage.
The characters in the film said “he thinks of the simplest thing first.” But. To me, this was an example of someone who wasn’t a lawnmower repair man, who assumed that the mower had gas, and therefore they looked for all kinds of ther problems.
To me. That was Billy Bob’s character, thinking outside of the box.

There are countless other examples.

I’ll mention an idea, that has been floated several times, when considering how humans will travel to other planets in the near future.
Currently. We do things like space travel, by bringing our environment, and what we drink and eat. Water, especially, is VERY heavy, and often is the heaviest part of longer flight designs. Not to mention, we have to reproduce our environment again, once we get to a planet or moon.

The idea I’m talking about is genetic tinkering with our astronauts, so they can breathe the air, drink available liquids, and eat available sources of nutrients on say an exoplanet we want to go to.
This would skip all the problems with trying to reproduce our environment on a distant planet.
We don’t change the environment if a place we’re going. We change us, to fit the environment of our choice.

Such a radical idea, is thinking outside the box.
“The box,” is full of people who are all thinking about how to get water and oxygen to other planets, or environments.
The people who said, let’s just change the astronauts, won’t be thinking about recycling urine, or the logistics and fuel requirements of getting a starship with a large amount of water on board out of Earth’s atmosphere.
Changing us, would make travel, and living in a foreign planetary environment, not really problems anymore. We’d have way more storage for scientific research, or smaller space vessels with people that are made to traverse space/time, and won’t have problems on the planet or destination whe8it comes to breathing, and maybe drinking, and food.

Its always a compliment. It infers that you don’t look at the obvious approach to an answer. Your approach to solving and thinking throws away the typical way and looks at things from a different perspective.

I most definitely see it as a compliment!!! You don’t always think & follow the rules as set up by others. You think for yourself & in a most unique way. Many of us strive to think out of the box but feel constrained in our thought process. You are free as a bird to think your own way!!! I salute you my friend!!!

You are an original thinker.

Draw a grid of dots arranged in 3×3. Now draw 4 straight lines to connect all dots. It’s possible, and my understanding is that this problem is the origin for the phrase.

@gorillapaws, is there a rule that says the four lines have to be connected?

I think I know exactly what you’re talking about. I spent my extra time for almost a week, trying to do that stupid puzzle.
In the directions, there is no mention of how people show it as solved.
If they were clear about specific reasons, I would have solved it in a few minutes.
I do do puzzles like that, often.
It’s a big personal issue I have, with puzzles that don’t explain the rules better.

@Jeruba You can’t lift your pencil.

It is a compliment. I think Piers Anthony did a good example of laying out the different ways we think to get to a conclusion.

@gorillapaws , Could you give the solution to the line and dot problem? I have seen it before and I believe it makes use of a line that is not horizontal, vertical or diagonal, but I don’t see how it is used.

@LostInParadise “Could you give the solution to the line and dot problem?”

Here you go

Thanks. You have to choose the lines in the right order, but that is not too difficult. Start at either end of the chosen diagonal.

Ok. That’s a different puzzle, than I was thinking about.
My bad.