Academic Tips for University

In this post, I want to break down some of the strategies that I have used and observed among my peers who do relatively well in university. Here’s the general structure:

1. The Learning Process Cannot be Taught
2. What To Do Before University
3. Study Strategies - Non-Exam Content
4. Study Strategies - Exams
5. Logistics tips

The Learning Process Cannot be Taught

Self-help books on learning miss a fundamental concept: there is no right way of studying. Everyone has different goals, mindsets and skills. Expecting a night-owl to wake-up early in the morning or a person involved in activities outside of school to devote countless hours of studying is problematic.

I argue that students should experiment with different ways of studying and find a groove that best fits them. I ran multiple experiments on study techniques back in high school and honed in on a system that worked well for me. My experiments were done on a 2-week basis. I followed the rough format below:

1. Determine which parts of my system are not working well: this requires some introspection on where you are failing and focusing in on improving one weakness. Here were some of the weaknesses that I have faced and probably will continue to face as I progress through university:
   1. Time management
   2. Deep focus on work
   3. Managing teammates
2. Perform a root-cause analysis: Simply stating that ’bad grades’ is the part of the system that is not working well is cheating you out of a good experiment. I like to employ a derivative of the ’5 Why’ system that Toyota uses to determine the root cause of manufacturing defects. Here’s an example: Why am I unable to focus deeply on my work → I get distracted → why do I get distracted → I like to talk to people around me → why do you like to talk people around you → They are often having interesting conversations. Immedietely, I realize the problem: interesting conversations distract me, so I need to remove it
3. Find a fix: this could be any technique that you have read online or a hypothesis that you have made yourself. I heard that studying in the library might help, so I tried that
4. Try it out for 1-2 weeks
5. Record results: this is the most important step. Without knowing how a certain fix has improved your life, you will have no inclination to continue doing it. Results could range from something quantiative like marks/hr of studying to something more qualitative like a boost in your mental health. Choose some metric and track that as you repeat these experiments over and over again and refine the system

Learning how to learn is an individual journey. Reading techniques from books and posts like mine will not help unless you try it out for yourself and determine if it works for you or not. Have a healthy dose of skepticism and test out these techniques yourself. In fact, I still experiment with several techniques across terms to continually improve my system; it is definitely far from perfect.

What to Do Before University

A lot of my friends from junior years have asked me this question. I typically give the following response:

1. Don’t aim to learn the curriculum, skim it: I sincerely believe that hardcore pre-studying for university is a complete waste of your last free summer. Use it to pursue your passions, spend time with family or get a job. These are far more useful than trying to predict the curriculum and learning everything about it. Even if you commit yourself to that, you may be in for a rude experience when professors start to add and subtract content from their curriculum on a whim during the term. Rather, I espouse that you skim the curriculum. Go to the university website and look at what first years learn. Figure out the major concepts that you will need to know and watch a few videos. You want to prime your brain before you enter the term but leave it flexible enough for last-minute changes. I used this strategy for my winter term, where I skimmed over my high school electromagnetism notes and watched a few Khan Academy videos. During the term, I found it much easier to digest the information while also spending minimal time studying during the break.
2. Take an online course: One of the biggest challenges that I faced when I got to university is the degree of self-study that is required for academic success. Unlike high school, there are no teachers to remind you of deadline and no parents to push you to complete assignments. The best way to prepare for such an environment is by jumping in headfirst and quickly learning personal strategies that can help you maximize your success. You can do this before you enter university by simply taking a MOOC. Choose a course that you are interested in and complete it to the best of your abilities. You get to have a slight taste of what university learning is like without the massive risk. Use this time to experiment with different study techniques and begin your journey of optimizing learning
3. Reach out to upper-years: this is something that I wish I had done. Upper-years are your single best resource in college. They know exactly how you feel and what it takes to succeed. Talk to upper-years and understand how they found their first year and what you can learn from their successes and mistakes. I had, and still have an irrational fear of reaching out to people. You have nothing to lose by reaching out to a senior: at worst, you may be considered a little odd and a go-getter (which isn’t bad at all); at best, you may learn something extremely insightful that will give you an advantage during first year.
4. Read “How to Win At College” by Cal Newport: While some of his advice is a little outdated, it is directionally correct from my experience.

Study Strategies - Non-Exam Content

From here on, I will be listing a whole bunch of strategies that I have heard, used or seen during my first-year. Feel free to experiment with each of these using the experiment framework that I have listed above:

• Find high-yield material: find the resources that can give you an advantage. Spending an hour finding this material will more than payoff that hour not spent studying.
• Timeblocking: block out hours in your day where you are singularly focused on one task and nothing else (no social media, no music, no phones)
• Practice problems: grind out practice problems but do it in the following way:
  1. Find out your weak spot
  2. Identify 10 problems in this weak spot
  3. Dive into 1-2 problems. If you cannot solve the problem, look at the answer and study the solution to death
  4. Repeat with the next 2 problems and see if you can hold out as long as possible without looking at the answers
• Create problem recipes: A huge waste of time solving problems is doing the actual math. Instead, focus on the high-level steps you need to take in order to get to the final answer
• Proof books: for math-intensive courses, write out important proofs and exercises taught in class and work through the proof formally
  • Annotate these proofs with tips and tricks that the professor used to arrive at the result
  • For assesments, review and redo the proofs in your proof book
• Pre-read: skim over the section that you will cover in the lecture 15 minutes before class starts. This worked wonders for me: in first term, I struggled with linear algebra for the first two weeks. Once I started pre-reading, lecture content made a lot more sense and my grades significantly improved
• Isolate yourself: for focused studying where you are trying to reinforce a concept, group studying may not be the best method. Instead, spend your time at a library or in an empty classroom and grind through assignments/homework
  • For UWaterloo students: You will probably start out studying at DC or E7. Those are amateur spots that everyone will crowd around during exams. Go seek empty classrooms; they are often empty at the end of the day and you can get some real focus in.
• Use group study for difficult concepts: if you know a peer that understands the topic much better than you, its a worthwhile and efficient investment of time to study with the peer and fill in gaps.
  • My friend group often did really focused 2 hour group study sessions a few hours before exams where we would ask trivia to each other to get our brains mentally prepped
• Plan out assignments two weeks out: making the conscious effort of planning out assignments will save you the terrible stress of completing an assignment the day before it is due
• Use flashcards for trivia/memory-based content: they work.
• Chunk out ideation time for essays: I often found it useful to chunk out a whole hour to just dwell on an essay topic and write down several ideas that came to my head. The ideas at the end were pretty creative and organic by the end of the session
• Don’t sit near your friends in lectures: you should only have a singular focus during lectures - to absorb as much content as possible. While bantering with friends may be fun, it reduces that focus to zero
• Go to office hours: if you have even a modicum of trouble on a problem set or an assignment, talk to the professor/TA. There maybe something fundamental that you were unable to grasp. Please be prepared with specific questions when going for office hours: it helps everyone involved
• Take walks: there is a study that I read that talks about the power of the unconcious mind. Allowing the unconcious mind to take control of the work by deliberately and literally walking away from the problem is a powerful technique. I can personally attest to this: some of the solutions to CS problems came when I wasn’t conciously thinking about them and taking a walk
• Leave your phone at home: the phone is a distraction. Leaving it prevents distraction and allows you to more easily slip into flow state

I’ll update this list as I hear and experiment with more techniques.

Study Strategies - Exam Content

Here are some of the steps that my peers and I took to best prepare ourselves for exams.

• Prepare 1-2 weeks in advance: a consistent study schedule is much more valuable than cramming the night before. Here’s what I like to do when I have exams

  • Prepare a list of all topics that will be covered in the exam
  • Count the number of days until the exam, leaving 2 days as buffer room and final practice
  • Based on the number of days given, allocate days to each topic, with more difficult topics meriting more days
  • Think of each chunk of days meant for a particular topic as a sprint. Thus, have a focus for each day (i.e. if you allocated 3 days reviewing multivariable integration, take the first day to review concepts, second day to practice assignment problems, third day to practice exam problems). Here is a picture of a typical week that I spent preparing for my midterms (this only has school-related stuff)

• Hunt for practice exams: nothing beats practice exams for preparation. Nothing. In 1A, one of my professors’ final exam was almost a copy of the exam from the previous year. It gives you the most relevant exam questions along with a decent understanding of how the exam will be structured
  • I like to divide exams into 2 types: final review or problem review. Exams that are designated problem review (often a lot older) are used to practice problems during the studying sprints. The final review exams (exams released in the past 2-3 years) are only exams that I can practice in the 4-5 day buffer window
• Ask the TA to clarify any last doubts
• Gather materials: spend a day gathering all the materials needed for the exam, such as assignments, quizzes and labs. Review these materials during the sprints
• Segment materials based on topics, not the material itself: I saw a friend in high school who did this masterfully. She collected all of her biology notes and assignments and mapped out which notes, assignment questions and quiz questions mapped to each topic in the syllabus. This helped her study a lot more effectively rather than going through the whole test and studying a set of topics.
• Do not read over notes: reading over notes is, by far, the worst way to study. Even highlighting has no significant utility upgrade for studying, because it tones down the interaction that you have with the materials you studies. Here are some strategies that I collected when determining how to best interact with study materials:
  • Practice assignment, midterm and quiz problems
  • Look through class problems and tips: they have a high likelihood of showing up on the exam
  • Truly understand every mistake, why you’re wrong and why you ended up making the mistake: a rigorous mistake analysis helped me immensely when studying for MATH 135 and cleared up some major learning mistakes I had made when studying modular arithmetic
  • Use the Feynman technique: for me, this is one of the most magical, time-effective ways of studying. It works on a simple principle: if you can explain a concept well enough for a child, you understand the concept. In that vein, I often review over my notes/assignments as if I am the class instructor and I am explaining it to a very dumb student. Forcing myself to explain it simply and explain each and every step of a sample problem has given me a solid foundation that I can use to deeply grasp more complex topics.
• Create questions: I’ve heard that study sessions that are guided by questions that you yourself has made up is quite useful, especially for courses that are content-heavy
• Don’t obsess: my friend has an interesting technique where he spends a lot of his time at the gym during exam season to prevent the stress from getting into his head. By preventing yourself from spending 24/7 at the library grinding your butt off for the next physics exam, you actually save yourself some mental energy and health. You shouldn’t try to work yourself to the bone; no one will give you a reward. You need to find a time-effective strategy that can maximize the marks you recieved/hour of study
• Don’t value marks: even if marks are personally important to you and your future goals, learning to separate the process of learning from the process of getting marks is an extremely valuable skill. I know a lot of people that place excessive value of marks and worry themselves endlessly, locking them in an anxiety trap. Although marks are quite important for me, I’ve learned that one bad mark is not going to hurt me in the long run. A simple technique that I like to do is ask myself: will this matter in a week? a month? in 5 months? a year? 5 years? You will quickly realize how silly your concerns are over marks
• Create cheat sheets: even if you can’t bring cheat sheets into your exam, the act of distilling the most important formula/information onto a few sheets is a great forcing function

AI Tips

With the advent of LLMs, we finally have easy-to-use AIs available for the general public. It would be foolish to not use these tools to improve your college life, but one has to be careful to not be carried away with these tools. Here are some tips that I developed as I started using it for school.

• Never use LLM output on an assignment: Use LLMs to structure essays, understand math proofs and work out complex calculations, but never copy-paste the answers from your prompts into your work. For one, many universities consider this plagiarism. Even if it isn’t considered an academic violation, the output is often constructed in a way that makes it clear that it is not your own work. Use the output, understand it, reword it in your own words and integrate it judiciously in your submission.
• Use LLMs to understand lecture slides and proofs: Many of my math courses often stuck complicated proofs on slides with many intermediate steps missing. Without LLMs, I would have been lost and would have needed to go to the prof or TA to understand.
• Use LLMs to generate questions and flash cards: You can upload lecture slides to LLMs and ask them to create content questions and answers. I used this feature extensively in my content-heavy courses, like cryptography.
• Buy premium LLMs: I bought ChatGPT premium to get early access to new LLMs and features; the quality difference between the free version and the premium version is quite palpable. It is definitely worth getting if you are using AI all the time (not just for school).

Logistics tips

• Create a course master spreadsheet: this spreadsheet should detail all the courses you want to take, when you want to take them and the additional degrees you want to take
  • This spreadsheet comes in clutch when you want to ensure that you are meeting your degree requirements. It is also very useful when you want to plan out different scenarios of courses
  • Having this spreadsheet was especially useful for exchange, as I could plan out different scenarios depending on the courses I was able to complete in Spain
  • Create this spreadsheet in first year so you can plan your courses effectively. One of the only reasons why I completed my statistics minor is because I planned it early; many people in my class could not do this minor because they only thought of taking a minor in their last few years

• Be friends with your program advisor: They will often look out for your interests and help you if you run into situations. For example, I realized that the one STAT 44x course that I wanted to take was not considered a technical elective. Since I knew my advisor, I just had to ask nicely for it to be added as a technical elective
• Course scheduling: At the beginning of each semester, put all your assignment, exam and other deliverables on a calendar. Review this calendar every week to make sure you don’t miss anything
• On skipping class: Your time is valuable. If you feel that you can make a better use of your time not attending class and reviewing the material yourself, then do it. Your education is your responsibility
  • In 1A, I had a linear algebra prof who couldn’t teach properly for his life. A lot of students stuck through it and had to spend additional time to decipher what he was learning. I simply ditched the class and went to another linear algebra prof, got their notes and studied it on my own time
  • Students will often claim that profs will reveal secrets to help them with their exam during their course and that is why they don’t want to leave. This may be true, but usually the tips have never been game changing. You can also always ask your friends who do attend class to see if there is anything revealed during lectures

Conclusion

I hope that some of the strategies that I have presented will be useful for students that are coming into university. Again, I want to iterate how personal learning strategies are for students. Don’t ever feel pressured to study the way the top student in your class is studying, or how your friends are studying. Studying is a personal experiment, so try out as many techniques as possible!

Resources

• Golden tips from Andrej Karpathy: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/advice.html
• A Mind for Numbers