Disclaimer
This blogpost is a consolidation of my thoughts in after roughly 8 years of experience in college. This reflects on the decisions I’ve made and the consequential responsibilities born from them. My views are undoubtedly contextualized with personal opinion, and should never be considered as an absolute truth; nevertheless, my unsolicited advice should hopefully give you a certain perspective - one I hope to impart you the wisdom to hopefully learn from my mistakes and embark on a journey that can be personally fulfilling.
I should state that I take my stance as a former delinquent. My post is also based on a quite opposite stance, that of a star student. I highly recommend that you read Andrej Karpathy’s blogpost before proceeding; I will be referring to his story through his initials, AK.
Backstory
Before entering college, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity of enrolling in a state science highschool. While I never worked and cared for high marks, breezing through a school that placed students on a pedestal without much effort gave me an inflated ego and misconception that my “talent” was enough to compete amongst the brilliant students in a top state university.
My pride exponentiated with my extreme addiction to video games blinded me for 3 years before realizing that I was going nowhere. I transferred where my family could support me. It took me the rest of the way to remove bad habits, and finally be competent. By my senior year, I was juggling my thesis, tenure as academic club president, and part-time work to prove to myself that I had matured.
On Grades and Growing
I dont have the right to proclaim that “your grades don’t matter” seeing as I don’t have exceptional grades. Fortunately, AK puts special emphasis that getting the highest possible mark is not most optimal way in maximizing your time in college. That being said, if pursuing honor’s list fancies you, then go for it. If you are no longer qualified for latin honors or it is almost impossible, it would be better to reach respectable grades, and instead improve yourself through other avenues. These avenues include:
- Expanding your network: by meeting students through other channels most commonly through extra curricular activities. You can pursue leadership roles/voluntary work/social gatherings to meet people beyond your circle. This allows you to meet people who are definitely better than you at certain aspects, which you can then depend on or learn from.
- Improving technical skills: by learning industry skills in the line of work you aim to pursue. A personal recommendation would be taking interships in the break or working for professors in your department. Getting proper mentorship from someone in your field will open up opportunities/challenges for you to upskill yourself.
- Exploring interests: by pursuing passions outside your course to determine if you are willing to pursue it. College is a testbed for immense, directionless growth to try out things that may or may not work. eg. If you are an engineering student with a passion for creative writing or an arts major interested in entrepreneurship. This saves you the time of exploring it after college in addition to having to meet people with the same interests as you.
It is very important that for any avenue you intend to pursue, you must go outside your comfort zone; This is to make sure that you are actually learning something new. If you find something that you genuinely care about, stick to it but do not get too comfortable; if not try something else. Always try to find new ways to grow and yourself beyond the horizon of college.
On Studying
The learning experience for everyone is different. Some people like to do it in bursts, others like to sit down laser-focused on longer periods of time. Some people enjoy company, others enjoy solitude. If you haven’t found your particular learning style, it’s very important to experiment what works and what doesn’t. AK provides exemplary situations you should exploit to maximize learning. While he could be enrolled in a school with topnotch instructors, the rest of us aren’t so lucky. You may be unlucky to have teachers that have too stringent requirements or have poor teaching skills.
For any case, the best way to go about learning is to maximize the amount of sources you expose yourself to. This means solely relying on your teacher as a point of reference will restrict you to his/her interpretation of the material. It is important to ask for the syllabus so you can get a hold of his source material. The internet is a godsend to finding other materials that could even be better than what your teacher provides. Using different source materials and your teacher’s lessons simultaneously will allow you to cross-examine which concepts are important. Books may tend to explain too much while teachers may tend to explain too little. In this spectrum, you should aim for a middle ground that allows you to become the teacher, as AK suggests.
Physically exercising too easily will minimize your gains while exercising too harshly can harm your body. The same can be said with studying. Studying too easily will minimize your understanding, and studying beyond your capabilities will just burn you out. Aim for a middle-ground that you are aware of and maintain it for as long as you can.
On Exams
AK already provides a good list of pointers to maximize performance in exams. However, the elephant in the room which points to cheating is something that I would like to emphasize. It does not directly hurt the teacher if you decide to cheat. It will only hurt you. It will only reinforce your habitual tendencies to cheat. Becoming dishonest with whether or not you truly understand the material will set you up for failure once you take on future courses/subjects that are built upon the foundations set by the current course (eg. cheating in algebra will set you up for bigger failure once you take calculus).
On Thesis
A lot of students hate their thesis. I have a particular love-hate relationship with mine. I generally hate thesis because it is tiring, but I love it as the embodiment of everything I’ve built up on college.
Here are some important pointers:
- Thesis Topic- You may choose a topic you like, or a topic a potential adviser suggests; the former is harder but is more interesting while the latter is more achievable but could be boring. If you choose the former, you should evaluate if you have the skills needed to execute the task and have genuine interest in it. This is important to know as early as possible. If you can expect the skills to be taught in class, then you are fine. If not, you must learn it before the actual semester of thesis; learning fundamentals during your thesis will hurt you in one way or another. If you chose the latter, then the role your adviser plays becomes much more important.
- Thesis adviser- It is common to have the ability to choose your adviser. Some situations it may not be the case. If the former is applicable, the most important criteria is communication. Even if you choose a subject matter expert in your chosen topic as your adviser, there is very little to gain if you have extreme difficulty of communicating with him/her.
- Breakdowns/Burnouts- Everyone experiences this in different forms and magnitudes. You will definitely experience this at some point. Looking into proper time management and spacing out the work evenly between the group (if you have one) will help you curb its efffects. I did my thesis alone and a big help to keeping my sanity was to continually switch up on different areas to avoid being cooped up; this means switching up in writing the paper, in documenting your progress, and in doing the technical work whenever I got bored at one.
On Mistakes
Making mistakes is just as important when compared to learning. Intelligently maximizing your mistakes means making all the mistakes you can afford (eg. when you study, not when you take an exam). It also includes trying out avenues that may have interested you only for you to conclude otherwise. Getting your hands dirty and making mistakes with many things, then choosing what type of muck you’re most interested in will do greatly in shaping your career and what kind of person you’ll want to be.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve diligently read this material from top to bottom, along with the initial material, then you’re halfway there! That is to say, in order to materialize the tips laid out for you, putting them into practice will be key. I advise you to map out the plan you currently have for yourself before closing this post and revise it based on what you’ve read.
Do you wish to become a leader? Do you plan on starting a business? Do you want to go into graduate school? College is such an important springboard to push yourself into who you want to be. But before making that jump, its important to know what direction you’re headed. Grades won’t help you determine what you’ll want to be, but growing and learning about yourself throughout college will. Trust me (and my eight years). Goodluck!