Hacker News Reader

Comment by alisonkisk | Hacker News Reader

Doing the assigned work is good way to learn the material.

Most teachers know better than most students what is need to do to succeed in the class.

When you spend most of your time in class, when do you have the time to do the assigned work? That’s what I struggled with.

How much class did you have? My first year at university had three hours of tutorials and ten hours of optional lectures per week. Subsequent years had less. There was plenty of time.

My engineering degree had six classes per term at 3 hours of class time per course. Two of those would be labs with a 3h lab each week. So 24 hours of in person time per week, with an expectation of 2-3 hours or outside work for every in class hour.

This was probably my biggest gripe with my mech eng degree. Every minute you spent grinding through a difficult topic until you understood it, was a minute that you needed to be studying for another exam or working on a project. In the end I came out with a pretty decent GPA, but a serious case of impostor syndrome as I never really felt like I had absorbed most of the material. Of course engineering is a demanding field, but I've often wondered if students would benefit from having five classes per term.

It’s distant but I think it was more like 25-30h per week? That was France though, I did a year in Canada and there were much less classes.

In all seriousness, I stopped going to lectures* and studied at my own pace. My learning isn’t linear, so there will be some topics that are easy that you can move quickly on. Other topics take more time. Sometimes you can take a detour and dive deeper kn interesting topics.

Going to lecture, sitting in lecture, waiting around, etc. provided very little information per unit time for me. I can’t learn math or anything quantitative from watching someone do it. By using lecture time as study time I was able to double the time spent learning the material.

When you get stuck, go to office hours. Or look for notes from similar courses for a different perspective.

At the start of the course look at the book and see what the prerequisite material is. Review that material during the first week when there is time.

* exceptions being courses that have a participation grade.

I tried my best to have profs that followed a textbook.

You'll win a lot more social points with your profs if you show up to the lectures and work on your own problems in your notebook. As an added benefit, if the lecture offers something special beyond what you can gain from the book then you'll be there in person to receive it.

I think I agree with you. For me lectures where mostly about trying to take notes while the teacher wrote on the blackboard. Completely useless in terms of learning. I stopped going to lectures after a while and just learned on my own.

I found lectures to be valuable only if I had reviewed the material beforehand. This was mainly because otherwise I just wouldn't be able to keep up in lecture.

If I had reviewed the material beforehand lectures were often extremely valuable for gaining new intuitions about a subject at hand that could be gleaned by an instructor's choice of explanation. And being able to ask questions in real-time was also quite valuable.

I wish I had realized this while I was still a student. By the time I was in grad school, it was too late. Now I make sure that I at least skim the material a bit before the lecture so I can see the other perspective, but also ask the professor/teacher any questions I had from my own pre-reading.

If you have other significant demands on your time then school is going to be hard no matter what strategy you choose and might just take a lot of years to finish (please vote for UBI to help change that status quo). Assuming you can commit to school full-time though, it's less of an issue:

- You can finish a typical bachelor's degree in 5y by devoting 48h/week to school (12h for classes, 36h for assigned work). That's more time than most teachers expect, and except for a few unlucky points in time where multiple large projects coexist you'll rarely have to actually spend that long studying.

- It's hard to express just how much of a difference it makes to start with a little easier content to ensure you have the requisite background; don't let your pride hold you back. E.g., if the university places you in math class X, start at class X-1. You'll spend less total time learning throughout your education, be far less stressed, get better grades, and understand the material better.

- If you just want the degree, a lot of the first 1-2yrs of college courses can be replaced with CLEP/AP/... tests. Anyone can take them (not just in high school), and it'll take a lot fewer hours and dollars to get a passing score on one of those than it will to get a good grade in an equivalent college course (at most universities such tests won't affect your GPA, so even a score of 40% on some of them still gets you a passing grade).

- It's quite a bit more efficient to take more courses at once, especially if they're closely related (e.g., topology, abstract algebra, real analysis, ...). If you have closer to 70-100h/w to spend in class and studying then consider finishing your degree in 2-3y instead of 4-5y. You'll still have plenty of time to do fun things over the summer and winter holidays, and I know I personally found it more motivating to have an end date in the near future.

I actually graduated in math, but I did struggle with these things. I also graduated in France where we have many more hours of class and the math program is pretty intense (did a year in Canada and it was a piece of cake in comparison). There’s also the fact that at that time you’re discovering yourself, partying, dating, etc. which takes a lot of time...

I'm nearly completion of a Bach Comp Sci that I've spent ~20 hours per week over 6 years (by the time I finish). I've done this while working full time as a single father who studies part time.

The time aspect is brutal. I'm ready to have regular hobbies. I'm ready to have a serious girlfriend. I'm ready to have regular social events. 6 years is a long time to just stop having a fulfilling life.

EDIT: I'm 1 grade in 1 unit off a perfect GPA. I'm at the point where I'm willing to have my GPA drop in order to free up some time to actually not be consumed by uni for the remainder of the time.

> It's quite a bit more efficient to take more courses at once, especially if they're closely related (e.g., topology, abstract algebra, real analysis, ...).

I agree that the interplay between related topics helps me form a more robust of understanding of the material.

On the other hand, it might be worth considering proactive and retroactive interference, (the difficulty of storing similar, long-term memories). The layman's takeaway is that it's generally better to learn a variety of non-related topics concurrently instead of similar ones in order to facilitate better long-term recall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com