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How to Study: A Brief Guide

cse.buffalo.edu

11–20 of 60 posts

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#11
If you are an emacs user, please take a look at org-mode. Most of the advice had been implemented in org-mode. I hope someone will find it worthwhile because org-mode helps me manage everything in just a text file. And, if you like it, here's an example set-up that I used:

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

Please don't be discouraged on the complexity of the tool. Just learn one at a time and soon you'll be used to it.

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#12

My Comp Sci lecturer always said you could get a lot by coming to class 10 minutes early and reading the relevant material and leaving 5 minutes late to read it again. I tried this method for a third-year compilers course and it was a very efficient way of getting a high frequency of "Gotcha" moments of understanding. As an aside, I really love how responsive and friendly web pages in this plain HTML style are. It's…

How do you do this when the lecture hall is occupied by the previous class or you have back to back lectures?

I not only had back to back lectures but a cycle commute between b2b lectures on different campuses!

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#13

My Comp Sci lecturer always said you could get a lot by coming to class 10 minutes early and reading the relevant material and leaving 5 minutes late to read it again. I tried this method for a third-year compilers course and it was a very efficient way of getting a high frequency of "Gotcha" moments of understanding. As an aside, I really love how responsive and friendly web pages in this plain HTML style are. It's…

How do you do this when the lecture hall is occupied by the previous class or you have back to back lectures?

I think the main idea is that you can do little quick easy things that can have a big impact in the long run.

On the way to your next class think about the lesson is there anything you've learned that you didn't know? In what ways can you restate the lesson, what are the main ideas. What possible questions could be asked.

During lunch read the summary section and see if you can connect any dots.

Looking at the homework early (without even solving them) will give you ideas to ponder and questions to ask during lecture.

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#14

Excellent resource with many study tips. As a high school student, it's hard to balance school, leisure, and code, and any sort of advice is appreciated. In addition, I've found Cal Newport's blog both inspiring and also interesting, as he focuses on "hacks" to get higher quality studying for your time ("more bang for your buck") Edit: Cal Newport's blog: http://calnewport.com/blog/ Edit 2: Another one of my sources…

I wasted tons of time while I was in high school, so kudos to you for aspiring for more and trying to be productive. Respect. On the other hand, don't forget to have fun! You have your whole life to be "grown up", but only a few years to be young and reckless, don't squander em. I feel old for writing that, but whatever. Don't overwork yourself, and don't let others take advantage of your enthusiasm. Burnout is real,…

Meh, you can be plenty reckless when you're old as well. There's always parties. I wish I had realized this when I was younger. It would have made me feel a lot less angsty about "wasting the best years on my life" on coding (which I really enjoyed) instead of spending my youth on parties.

Also; saying "don't overwork yourself" doesn't really work. It's better to let a person overwork themselves and learn the lesson the hard way. People told me that over and over but I never actually took it to heart until I actually did it.

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#15

I think that this kind of advice can be detrimental to people like me. It basically says force yourself to study 5 hours a day no exceptions. If you get a job or other extracurricular activities don't count it as work time. Well, I lived that lifestyle in high school. I studied 4 hours a day, limited every extracurricular activities to not interfer with my study time. At the end I believe I have missed a great portio…

Your last point is very valid for me. I've exclusively kept Malcolm Gladwell's Spaghetti Sauce ted talk for that purpose. Every time I need to work in a problem without distraction, I just start this and go deep.

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#16

I think that this kind of advice can be detrimental to people like me. It basically says force yourself to study 5 hours a day no exceptions. If you get a job or other extracurricular activities don't count it as work time. Well, I lived that lifestyle in high school. I studied 4 hours a day, limited every extracurricular activities to not interfer with my study time. At the end I believe I have missed a great portio…

Fight procrastination by starting the habit of studying one hour daily, or even half an hour. At first it's more about the habit than about the progress. Find a buddy to support you in your quest. When the habit sets in, which could take months, start to set other goals or habits.

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#17
I went through university not knowing how to study, and as a result, I now have a "worthless" degree. One thing is, that the university and the degrees I took was a joke. 3-6 hours of "class" (100+ people crammed into an auditorium), no graded homework or feedback during semesters, and examns was just handing in 12-15 pages of analysis, and then getting a grade on my report sheet. No contact with educators, no counselling, guidance or otherwise interaction with lecturers, educators or other staff at the university. I could sit a home 30 hours a week and still get my "degree". Basically no feedback from the university on how I did, where I was heading etc.

For me, this means I made a lot of stupid choices. For one, I never understood the degree I took, but relentlessly kept on "fighting", as I thought that it _had_ to make sense to me someday. It never did. Swapped studies during my masters, but got into a "soft" IT-programme that didn't resonate with me either. As a result, I never learned to study, because I would get stressed out that the material never really made sense to me. I couldn't connect it to anything in the real world (and perhaps more important to me - no job postings ever seemed to ask for the skills I was acquiring).

Today, two years after i finished with an A+ (I wonder how...), and average grades in general, I have a galloping depression, and just wish that I could do it all over. No doubt I was perhaps immature or used to be a "natural talent" through high school, and therefore thought University was just passing examns. That hurts me a lot, and I have a hard time letting that thought go. I don't think anyone will ever be able to convince me, that the university or classes I went to was working as intended however. In my mind, education cannot solely be based on people reading and writing for themselves.

I wish someone would have shown me a guide like that when I started, and helped me manage my ambitions and performance a bit more throughout university. I'm now a worthless member of society, even though I have a degree. I don't think anyone is happy with the outcome, but I'm pretty sure I'm the only one to blame. At least thats what I keep telling myself.

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#18
Here's some of my personal experience how I have learned to study better in university:

While reading through your material, take notes. Moreover take notes that make sense to you. Don't copy something for the sake of it if you don't understand it, try write it down in a way that reflects your current knowledge of it and how it makes sense to you.

Also I wouldn't probably take everything in that article word for word. I mean:

Do not listen to music or TV: It is virtually impossible to do two things at once if one of them is studying.

sound just silly, okey I listen to calmer music when I study but should you always advocate for total ruthless silence? I think there's other aspect overlooked by the writer(s) that you should try to make studying enjoyable or at least tolerable.

Of course in a way it is similar to straining yourself in physical exercise and more you do it the better you get at it but at times studying hard leaves you only depleted and uninspired about the work you do. I used to do studying in a group which while entertaining didn't really at times help me to internalize the material. Now when I do mostly self-studying I can internalize really well but the solitude is kinda boring at times. Until you get into the flow and really start digging what you are doing at least.

But my advice to anyone who wants to study better is to take it seriously. Take notes from your material. Write down mind-maps or whatever from the concepts to help you visualize them. Use Youtube to find lessons if you feel the material is too abstract. Ask questions from people smarter than you (if there is anyone around). Implement your own solutions about problems you care about (if applicable). The mental border I see when people study is that some just want to pass the course and get perhaps a good grade. How I have started to study is I want internalize the key-concepts so well that I can use them. That means that I might spend ridiculous amounts of hours on some basic concept until it makes sense to me. At times that might cause me to miss on couple other concepts but that's the trade-off I'm willing to make.

After you have studied the subject comes the hard part that is actually maintaining that knowledge. This is where I think having learnt key-concepts well really helps as you have those couple key-points to which you can return to quite easily. On the other hand if I didn't try to apply the concepts to something concrete I'll probably forget how those abstract ideas were ever linked to "reality".

EDIT: Downvoted for no reason? Must have been a sore day for someone to have my comment cause him/her to channel their negative energy into disapproving my personal opinion on a subjective matter. But I guess this is nothing out of ordinary in HN. (Was it too long? You didn't agree with me on something? Please let me know)

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#19

If you are an emacs user, please take a look at org-mode. Most of the advice had been implemented in org-mode. I hope someone will find it worthwhile because org-mode helps me manage everything in just a text file. And, if you like it, here's an example set-up that I used: http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html Please don't be discouraged on the complexity of the tool. Just learn one at a time and soon you'll be used to…

Second this. I am not a dev - Learned about emacs from an article that was posted on HN. Took me about a week to know the most basic things, I still don't know enough to use emacs regularly, but it's a great, distraction-free environment to work in.

This is the article that got my started: https://blog.fugue.co/2015-11-11-guide-to-emacs.html

Re: How to Study: A Brief Guide

#20

My Comp Sci lecturer always said you could get a lot by coming to class 10 minutes early and reading the relevant material and leaving 5 minutes late to read it again. I tried this method for a third-year compilers course and it was a very efficient way of getting a high frequency of "Gotcha" moments of understanding. As an aside, I really love how responsive and friendly web pages in this plain HTML style are. It's…

> It's a pity they're only used by older academics now.

For about a year or so I've gone with the (nearly) plain HTML style. It sometimes feels weird to avoid styling, but it's hard to do better for anyone using a mobile device/poor internet connection. It really changed my perspective when I was using a 2G connection and couldn't even check the score of a football game.

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