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Comment by jhspaybar | Hacker News Reader

The reality is work is quite easy at college if you have the maturity to handle your independence. I'm at a UC school double majoring in CS and Econ and I probably do less than an hour of studying to prepare for midterms and finals. I don't have a 4.0(although I am close), but I instead manage to put 6 or 7 courses into a quarter schedule. I think it really just comes down to doing the learning NOW. Don't understand it? Interrupt the teacher in a 100 person lecture hall. You're here for yourself, and the closer you can put your understanding of the material to when it is being taught, the better off you are.

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I went to Berkeley with EECS major and from what I could see 1 hour per week would be impossible unless you manage to somehow avoid taking any of the difficult classes, which would need to be done very strategically. Maybe you spent time in office hours instead, or having friends explain stuff to you, but I would include those in "studying time". If I'm wrong, I'd love to know how you completed major programming assignments in say compilers or operating systems, or prepared for your algorithms exams with just 1 hour per week. Sometimes it took me a couple hours just to fully understand what the professor had assigned due to language barrier (theirs), grammar (theirs), and other issues.

I also took an upper division economics class at Berkeley and that took far more than an hour of studying. Even at community college I studied my econ classes for more than an hour per week. Unless you have a photographic memory I'm not sure how you can avoid it and still get good grades. Please explain your technique.

I absolutely agree. I did CS and EE at Cornell for my undergrad and there's simply no way to complete the weekly or bi-weekly projects on an hour of work alone. I could believe that someone with a strong memory and solid work ethic could make it by with an hour of studying a day/week but that's only because their knowledge was supplemented through the hands-on work.

I am considering my "study time" only that which is done outside of assigned projects. My algorithms class assigns homework and lab projects which I take seriously and approach with the idea that I don't want to have to look at this material again before an exam. So, in this sense, I'm always studying, it's just that almost none of it is actual traditional study time. I don't do office hours(with as many courses as I take, they always conflict). I think maybe it's just that our definition of studying is different, I consider studying to be the period of time above and beyond lectures, homework, and projects. It is this piece of time that I can take almost to zero as long as I approach the lectures, homework, and projects properly.

By that extremely liberal definition of studying, I "studied" no more than an hour or two in 7 years of undergrad + law school...

Studying is studying. It doesn't matter if it's assigned studying or not.

I've found that even for the more difficult classes (does 172 count as difficult?) you can get away without studying much if you go to lecture, do the homework and do at least some of the reading. I guess you could include doing the reading as part of the "studying", but even that doesn't take too long.

Also, a bunch of the project-oriented classes simply assign enough work that you don't need to study much beyond it. If you're spending something like 10 hours a week on programming projects, you tend to pick the material up fairly quickly.

So I guess it depends on how you define studying: if you include doing assignments and reading then I do a fair bit. If you only include anything beyond that (e.g. reviewing lecture notes or something like that) I do relatively little, and only before harder exams.

I usually assume that studying refers to anything not directly assigned, which is why you can get away without too much of it assuming you go to lecture and discussion and that you do all the assigned work.

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