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Great advice, thanks!

> Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign

I agree, but having homeworks in itself is a big advantage! It means you're in a structured learning environment where someone has taken the care to create a learning path and added checkpoints with carefully designed problems designed to refresh + assess what you've absorbed until that point.

When you're learning outside the classroom (for yourself or on the job), there's this sudden loss of all bounds where you now also have to draw a line of what knowledge is reasonable to acquire and what is out of scope. For example, when working independently on personal projects, I sometimes get sucked into reading about the details of protocols, standards, RFCs etc. and have a difficult time deciding when to stop.

One answer is learn just enough to solve the problem at hand at move on, but if you're in a field like eg. security you feel an obligation to do your due diligence when designing something. And of course, with LLMs now it's possible to move past any problem without learning anything at all, so you have to be even more intentional in which things you do decide to learn.

This is why I always recommend an education over self learning programming. I can absolutely see the argument in places like the US where it costs an arm and a leg, but in Europe and other places with free education it's pretty much a no-brainer to me.

Not only does it help you learn in a structured way with predetermined goals etc, but you end up with fairly solid evidence of what you've learned.

I think the self learning path is much more difficult, both figuring out what to learn and then proving what you know to a potential employer. I tried that first and did learn some things, then I tried calling a potential employer who asked me a few questions, quickly assessed that I wasn't up to their standard and recommended a formal education. I took his advice and my career was pretty much on rails from then on.

A common argument is that they teach a lot of "useless" stuff and you can tailor your learning better on your own. I think it's really hard to figure out what to learn when you have no idea what the options are, and I think you won't know what's useful until you end up using it. Many people go through their whole careers doing things the wrong way because they don't know they need to learn something that would help them do better. There's also nothing stopping you from learning extra things beyond the curriculum, in fact I would recommend that.

Another common one is "I didn't learn anything in university" and all I can say about that is if you spent 3 years where your job was learning, and you didn't learn anything, then that's on you.

>Another common one is "I didn't learn anything in university" and all I can say about that is if you spent 3 years where your job was learning, and you didn't learn anything, then that's on you.

I don't think that's what people mean when they say that. They followed the curriculum and then when they started working they found they needed little of what they had studied and had a lot of gaps in their knowledge that needed to be filled.

That will always be the case though. No education is perfect, it will lag behind infustry standard because it takes time for the curriculum to catch up and industry standard still evolves rapidly.

I also think this view severely underestimates how much you actually end up using. For example you (are supposed to) learn at least one and more likely 2-3+ programming languages. We learned DSA which I very frequently see mentioned as "useless" which just tells me they never understood the topic to begin with. We learned about databases which I'd say most developers end up using. We learned about web development which sure if you go on to work on embedded systems or something you might not use it but it's a stretch to say it's useless.

I think the DSA example encapsulates a lot of this. Most people aren't top students who actually understand the topics, most people are mediocre and lazy. They learn barely enough to pass then they forget 90% of it and then they complain that it was a waste of time. Well duh. Of course it's a waste of time when you didn't actually learn it.

They go to uni just for the piece of paper and then complain that all they got was the piece of paper.

> ...typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough

What sorts of things are you writing into your markdown file? After 3.5 years of uni I still don't know how or why to take proper notes to enhance my learning.

I never learned to take notes. Good grades but think my notes were always rubbish!

Taking notes is like lifting weights. You don't need the weights to be higher, and you don't need the notes to exist. The process of writing organizes thoughts.

For students, that is. If you're writing papers or a book you should probably structure and manage your notes somehow. But for uni classes, well, it isn't even recommended that you read your notes. Or teachers' slide decks.

Lectures, slides and notes are merely a hike through the territory. You're supposed to range it by yourself later, seek out papers and books. Digest as much material as you can as early in the course as you can. Taper it off towards exams and do not study for a few days beforehand.

Basically the opposite of every student's instincts. It works though. Learning takes inquiry, breadth and depth and lots of sleep to sink in. Cramming for exams is self defeating.

40 years ago we just wrote as much as we could down. The teacher usually hand wrote on the chalkboard. Some courses had slides, a precursor to PowerPoint. There is some reasearch that writing down on paper or with a stylus puts the stuff in extra places in our head.

> I still don't know how or why to take proper notes

I find that there is some element of ritual to "proper" notes. Its personal, and everyone differs. Any given system may sound logcal and sensible, but its most important that you write something, anything. Everything else doesnt really matter. I like to use real paper and pen, and start with a wide ruler drawn margin on the left (of course, you can buy paper with this. I prefer to do it by hand. It feels right.) and the date and subject at the top. Then I put keys on the left (page numbers, question numbers, subtopics, speakers in a meeting) and values on the right (insights, things that seemed cool, the steps of a particularly tricky bit, definitions of words)

I put a dash before tasks I have to do, and a question mark on words or concepts I heard but didn't understand and I need to go look up later.

Literally none of this is necessary. It supports my learning only in the sense that it makes me feel like im doing things right. I rarely ever come back and read them (usually only ad-hoc looking for something I knew I wrote but cant remember, not a structured review of them). Your system is for you to figure out yourself. A lot of it came from imitating my math teachers. But maybe the description helped?

Some days I write the date and a margin, and nothing else. No pressure, not every day is a notes day. Some days you learn a ton, and others don't challenge you at all. Thats normal too.

BTW, this is darn near to being bullet journaling. It’s also almost exactly how I ended up taking notes after experimenting with bullet journaling and throwing out the parts I don’t really use.

> It supports my learning only in the sense that it makes me feel like im doing things right

I think my downfall might have been questioning the efficacy of my method beyond it just "feeling right" and trying to find ways to show myself that I am learning.. maybe the correct approach is to just do whatever and hope for the best

I would add that writing down your reactions to the books and not the book content itself is helpful. If something reminds you of something else then write about that. I mostly throw away all these things as the point is just to write them not to read them back

Yep. I consider it essentially "explaining it to myself". It serves a similar purpose as trying to teach someone else - trying to write something concisely and clearly is difficult unless you actually understand it, and then it often feels obvious. So if I'm struggling, I should probably think about it more (which the struggling is also accomplishing), and maybe go back and reread it to make sure I get it.

It's kinda the purpose of note-taking imo. At its core, it's a mechanical way to enforce "think more about it". Simply putting words down in some form is at least partly achieving that, though if it's mindless it doesn't tend to provide very much benefit beyond that point.

(this is also why I despise mandatory note-taking in classes. they have universally expected something like a dictation, and that isn't how I take notes. (I'm fully aware these are just awful teachers and it isn't how all others operate, and there were many other signs they were awful))