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Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

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Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#191

Post by ProllyInfamous »

stared wrote: post #58

I never visited my professors or TAs during office hours. In retrospect, I see I missed free one-on-ones, not only to ask about assignments or tests, but also to talk about the big pictures, misunderstandings, etc, etc.

I spent few semesters of college sober, mostly just coasting through intro-level courses on my way to grad school. But it was magical when I actually cared about a subject / instructor, and got to know them during group study sessions / office hours. I learnt physical chemistry from one of the co-inventors of white LED — the baddest bitch in that college town (she did not gifeAF about anything but her own incredible inventions). Her equally-brilliant husband was my academic advisor (but you would never suspect they're married) =P

Our alumni network sends out a quarterly academic publication, and it's always nice to see how certain former peers/instructors "panned out" — e.g. a former classmate is now a nobel laureate (mutually-unknown, but I supported his team's hardware as a student job). My favorite are former TAs from my introductory labs that are now running their own quirky laboratories (many of us smoked.erryday.homies, at least at the time..).

It was only a decade after grad school that I realized how important people / networking can be. I am not a typical graduate, but "go Dores."

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#192

Post by godshatter »

foofoo12 wrote: post #120

> It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning. If you really try to solve a problem and then put it away for a day or two, you'll often find that your brain has done some good background processing on the problem. I've experienced it multiple times and one of our professors recommended it as a "trick of the trade".…

When I was cramming for a test the day before I would use an accelerated version of this. I would work on something difficult for maybe an hour or so, then go do something fun for a few minutes that required focus. Going for a walk just left me continually trying to work on the problem while I walked.

Back in the day I would play pool (had access to a pool table nearby). These days, I'd go play a video game that took skill and focus. I'd do this for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and hit that problem again. It didn't always work, but sometimes time pressures caused me to fall into a mental rut and when you're in one all you can seem to do is dig deeper.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#193

Post by OkayPhysicist »

neilv wrote: post #107

Some good advice, but two of the pieces surprised me: > Go to the prof before final exam at least once for office hours. - Even if you have no questions (make something up!) Profs will sometimes be willing to say more about a test in 1on1 basis (things they would not disclose in front of the entire class). Don't expect it, but when this does happen, it helps a lot. Does this give you an unfair advantage over other st…

If someone can't figure out how to take advantage of widely available stimulants, it's a dramatic disadvantage in frankly all facets of life. There's no prize for deliberately hampering yourself by refusing to use the tools available to you.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#194

Post by OkayPhysicist »

jackling wrote: post #22

Lots of good advice in this article. My favorite pieces that I agree with 100%: > Reading and understanding IS NOT the same as replicating the content. This happens to me all the time. It's really important to try and replicate everything that you learn. I would go even further and constantly reaffirm that you still know how to prove facts that you take for granted. > NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early. Every time…

> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.

This strongly depends on what stage of the studying/cramming process you are on. If the option is between going over everything a third time, or going to bed, go to bed. If you've never successfully completed a problem in a certain part of the subject? Getting there will almost certainly be more valuable than the trade-off in sleep. No amount of sleep is going to fill holes in your knowledge.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#195

Post by jama211 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #170
jama211 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different. That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t ap…

>Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable. Sadly, this current batch of graducates can't grab anything even with decent schools and grades. Some are putting a huge emphasis only on Tier 1 schools. Crazy how quickly everything changed.

There is a hiring problem for graduates absolutely, and there is no silver bullet. I will say that from my understanding and experience though having project experience (even personal projects) is still more important than grades at 90% of tech jobs. It doesn’t make it easy, just less hard though of course.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#196

Post by jama211 »

121789 wrote: post #154
jama211 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different. That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t ap…

Plenty of places ask for GPA for university graduates, and a low ine is disqualifying. After a few years no one will ever care again, again unless you want to go to a grad school like an MBA, where a very low GPA can again be disqualifying

Plenty of places do I agree, but the majority don’t. Also I find that experience specific to a role is far more important.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#197

Post by Jensson »

bananaflag wrote: post #173
jeffreygoesto wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not, it distracted me from listening. One of the key things to do was to do and not only read as many exercises as possible, including the old ones of the same professor. Then going back to reading the material once you got stuck. Most of the time I studied with a good friend who had to go to the army and did not want to lose those years. So I prepared everything during the semester and taught it to him when he…

I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).

> To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write

But that is worse than just listening and doing that in your head, so people who already listens the right way the note taking gets in the way, writing things down is strictly inferior if you know how to listen since it adds an unneeded extra step.

I never wrote things down in lectures and I could ace the math exams without studying more because I listened to the lectures. None of the people who took notes could do that, and neither could I the times I tried to take notes.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#198

Post by epolanski »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #172
epolanski wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.

Depends, is your goal in college to get a high GPA and look good for a job, or to truly learn and master content but not look as attractive on a resume without other projects? Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.

The foundational purpose of universities is truth-seeking, not job training. There's universities like Bologna, al-Qarawiyyin, Oxford or Cambridge that are more than 1000 years old.

The ultimate goal is knowledge cultivation.

You're more adapt to intellectual work only if you actually cultivate knowledge.

If all this college circus is, farming grades, then universities are ultimately failing at their job.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#199

Post by johnnyanmac »

epolanski wrote: post #198
johnnyanmac wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends, is your goal in college to get a high GPA and look good for a job, or to truly learn and master content but not look as attractive on a resume without other projects? Grading curves aim to mitigate punishment for the latter. It's part of why I could get a 2.5 GPA but still overall succeed in my career.

The foundational purpose of universities is truth-seeking, not job training. There's universities like Bologna, al-Qarawiyyin, Oxford or Cambridge that are more than 1000 years old. The ultimate goal is knowledge cultivation. You're more adapt to intellectual work only if you actually cultivate knowledge. If all this college circus is, farming grades, then universities are ultimately failing at their job.

I don't disagree with you at all. But we both probably know that that isn't the reality as of the last half a century or so.I'd love to properly separate acedemia and create a bolstering apprenticeship/trades programs for several sectors to properly train a workforce, but there's basically zero momentum for that among white collar work.

Also note that GPA isn't just for jobs. Applying for school post bachelor's cares the most about a GPA. So a bad grade but learning a lot on a rigorous course can still male it hard to progress as a researcher or any other kind of specialized knowledge seeker.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#200

Post by vlovich123 »

airstrike wrote: post #157
vlovich123 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the cohort due poorly or were the tests given to that cohort harder than in previous years? Or was the teacher a more difficult grader than others? You're jumping to the conclusion that the cohort was underperforming just because the grades were lower when other things out of their control could have been involved.

Tests are generally almost identical YoY where as humans are all very different! I think I'm making the simpler argument here

The university I went to had student run test banks of previous exams that the administration sanctioned. If the following year you get the same question as the previous year, then you’re going to do better than the year that got the first version of that question.

You’re also ignoring the human element of grading particularly in subjective parts of an exam.

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