I don't miss university at all. In hindsight most of it was a scam and I learnt most things on my own either by opening a book, starting my own project or through research.
You don't need a 50 point list to learn anything even to a proficient level. Exams are bullshit.
I personally rarely joined group study sessions, but thinking back, I should have joined more of them.
To expand on one of the points listed here: do a first pass through questions before writing a single thing and mark which you feel are easy vs. hard (this evaluation may change once you start working on them!). Your prioritization should be: easier + higher points, easier + lower points, then hard in order of perceived difficulty weighted by points.
Oh, and if your course requires memorizing a set of known formulas, write them down first thing on the very last page :)
Tests are all bullshit. They are just some arbitrary questions, trying to figure out whether you understood the material, which were made up by some guy who has much more important things to do.
If you want to spend your time well, either do networking or try to understand the material. If you are there trying to game the system (which hilariously Karpathy is suggesting you do, in a very mild way) then you should seriously consider why you are there in the first place.
Also consider that when you are tested outside of school you will always be tested to face to face.
I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while.
As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together?
When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part.
If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook.
People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.
It meant that I understood the scaffolding of the course: the broad goals of the subject, the main ways to tackle them, what is currently being explored, and why are we going in this direction at this moment.
There was one class where this started to fail, which was a class without slides or a book. This meant that, without notes, when I recalled a proof technique but not the details, I had to resort to asking others for their notes. Because it wasn't documented anywhere else.
>Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. [...] Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.
While probably 90% of undergrads undershoot in terms of time spent on their courses, the other 10% "Goodhardt" their grades and misallocate their time and abilities.
The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen.
1. Follow actively the lessons.
2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons
Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance
One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given.
There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.
> Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study.
It’s difficult to escape tunnel vision when your most urgent and highest priority task tends to be the required homework and studying you have right in front of you, and you directly get feedback on that work.
> Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.
I agree with all the advice here, but in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this. These things are all something you can do away from school, so while in school, it felt like a waste to not make use of the school to do things on my own.
Overall the advice is much easier said than done, even if it is something I completely agree with.
> 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 I find a mistake.
Some pieces that I really disagree with:
> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.
I don't think this works, at least for me, it doesn’t. I never studied on test day unless the test was in the evening. Even in cases where I had ample time to study, I focused on preparing for my later tests. By the time test day rolls around, you either know the material or you don’t. I don’t think short-term memory is as valuable as the writer is making it out to be. I also worry that the added stress may cause you to confuse yourself when trying to frantically read through your notes or textbooks.
> If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, chug an energy drink.
Your health is more important than the tests you take. These energy drinks are terrible for you and your brain, in my opinion. After hours of sitting, drinking such a high concentration of sugar and caffeine is terrible for you. Just go out for a walk, take a shower, and if that doesn't help, go to sleep. Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.
> 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.
I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework.
If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course.
It is curious because Andrej recognizes this with his comments concerning coffee.
To me it seems Andrej Karpathy is like the new AI guru. In this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 he predicted the future of AI a decade ahead. Do not get me wrong, I do think he is very knowledgable on the subject.
> Places with a lot of background noise are bad and have a research-supported negative impact on learning. Libraries and Reading rooms work best.
This was horrible advice for me and caused my a lot of grief for many years wondering why I still couldn't focus.
Nothing against Andrej, part of the reason I hate this advice is that this is very common advice for what your environment should look like. This was advice given by study workshops at my college. I'm sure this works for a decent chunk of the student population.
Quiet places cause me to mentally drift into outer space and I just zone out.
You know what is a great environment? Semi-busy coffee shops + headphones + instrumental music. I'm able to consistently lock in for 4-5 hours. When I go back to my "nice quiet home environment" I get distracted immediately and refocusing is super hard.
Like I said, this is standard advice that works for a portion of the population, but I think this makes a ton of other people in the same boat as me feel lazy/discouraged/unfocused/stupid losers when in reality "nice quiet places" might not work for them.
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."
I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case.
In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something".
I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.
I can't pay attention during lectures. Not "this is difficult" but "I cannot keep the sentence being spoken in memory long enough to understand it". They speak too slowly and take large pauses while writing.
I have found no solution for this besides watching recordings at a significantly faster speed, preferably clipping silences.
I have been tested and found explicit evidence of this short term memory deficiency which healthcare providers directly refused to address instead offering childish advice about sleep and self care offering SSRIs as well.
53 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 59.9 ms ] thread[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130404071259/https://cs.stanfo...
You don't need a 50 point list to learn anything even to a proficient level. Exams are bullshit.
I personally rarely joined group study sessions, but thinking back, I should have joined more of them.
To expand on one of the points listed here: do a first pass through questions before writing a single thing and mark which you feel are easy vs. hard (this evaluation may change once you start working on them!). Your prioritization should be: easier + higher points, easier + lower points, then hard in order of perceived difficulty weighted by points.
Oh, and if your course requires memorizing a set of known formulas, write them down first thing on the very last page :)
Tests are all bullshit. They are just some arbitrary questions, trying to figure out whether you understood the material, which were made up by some guy who has much more important things to do.
If you want to spend your time well, either do networking or try to understand the material. If you are there trying to game the system (which hilariously Karpathy is suggesting you do, in a very mild way) then you should seriously consider why you are there in the first place.
Also consider that when you are tested outside of school you will always be tested to face to face.
Is there a way to enforce non-thin fonts on web pages in the browser?
As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together?
When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part.
If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook.
People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.
It meant that I understood the scaffolding of the course: the broad goals of the subject, the main ways to tackle them, what is currently being explored, and why are we going in this direction at this moment.
There was one class where this started to fail, which was a class without slides or a book. This meant that, without notes, when I recalled a proof technique but not the details, I had to resort to asking others for their notes. Because it wasn't documented anywhere else.
>Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. [...] Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.
While probably 90% of undergrads undershoot in terms of time spent on their courses, the other 10% "Goodhardt" their grades and misallocate their time and abilities.
1. Follow actively the lessons.
2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons
Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance
I was always told NOT to study right before the test because it hinder retrieval of long term memory.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/...
There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.
> Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study.
It’s difficult to escape tunnel vision when your most urgent and highest priority task tends to be the required homework and studying you have right in front of you, and you directly get feedback on that work.
> Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck.
I agree with all the advice here, but in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this. These things are all something you can do away from school, so while in school, it felt like a waste to not make use of the school to do things on my own.
Overall the advice is much easier said than done, even if it is something I completely agree with.
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 I find a mistake.
Some pieces that I really disagree with:
> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test.
I don't think this works, at least for me, it doesn’t. I never studied on test day unless the test was in the evening. Even in cases where I had ample time to study, I focused on preparing for my later tests. By the time test day rolls around, you either know the material or you don’t. I don’t think short-term memory is as valuable as the writer is making it out to be. I also worry that the added stress may cause you to confuse yourself when trying to frantically read through your notes or textbooks.
> If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, chug an energy drink.
Your health is more important than the tests you take. These energy drinks are terrible for you and your brain, in my opinion. After hours of sitting, drinking such a high concentration of sugar and caffeine is terrible for you. Just go out for a walk, take a shower, and if that doesn't help, go to sleep. 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.
I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework.
If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course.
It is curious because Andrej recognizes this with his comments concerning coffee.
That’s basically it.
This was horrible advice for me and caused my a lot of grief for many years wondering why I still couldn't focus.
Nothing against Andrej, part of the reason I hate this advice is that this is very common advice for what your environment should look like. This was advice given by study workshops at my college. I'm sure this works for a decent chunk of the student population.
Quiet places cause me to mentally drift into outer space and I just zone out.
You know what is a great environment? Semi-busy coffee shops + headphones + instrumental music. I'm able to consistently lock in for 4-5 hours. When I go back to my "nice quiet home environment" I get distracted immediately and refocusing is super hard.
Like I said, this is standard advice that works for a portion of the population, but I think this makes a ton of other people in the same boat as me feel lazy/discouraged/unfocused/stupid losers when in reality "nice quiet places" might not work for them.
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."
In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something".
I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.
I have found no solution for this besides watching recordings at a significantly faster speed, preferably clipping silences.
I have been tested and found explicit evidence of this short term memory deficiency which healthcare providers directly refused to address instead offering childish advice about sleep and self care offering SSRIs as well.
If you dont have it in you, none of this will matter, you will not be able to do it anyway.