Studying

During exchange, Adrian and I introduced our studying methodologies to Sophie and Shahitya. It was pretty interesting to see them startled at how different it was from their own. I realized that my studying methods (for school at least) were wildly optimized. Honestly, I’m quite proud of it. I’m not saying it’s the best, but it’s served me really well by allowing me to have core understanding, ability to test well, and do it all in a short time.

If you’re reading this and you think your studying methods or better, please reach out and tell me about it! The point of these methodologies is to improve overtime anyways.

Note

For now, this is only for school studying—where testing is a major part of the system. I think I have another methodology for studying topics that I’m deeply interested in consisting of hyper-obsession and content-diet tailoring. I’ll go more into it when I’m more proud of it.

I’m framing this in a way that I would study if I have a final exam tomorrow and I know nothing right now. If given time, my preferred studying method is actually just perusing good fundamental resources on the topic so I can learn as much as I can, and then believe that this fundamental knowledge should get me a good mark, but probably not a great one because I haven’t tuned myself to what the teacher is doing.

1. Resource Aggregation

This is probably the most important part. You want to ensure you have the highest quality resources, and because it’s typical that there aren’t many, it’s beneficial to try and get access to all resources.

Examples:

• Textbook
• Slides
• Notes from teacher, friends, or past students
• Past exams/solutions
• Practice questions/solutions
• Youtube videos
• ChatGPT/Claude
• Classes

Notes:

• Test taking involves tuning yourself to the style of your teacher. This is why Youtube videos are great for learning fundamentals and quick tricks, but it can be dangerous to do a bunch of practice according to Khan Academy videos on Statistics rather than the ones your teacher provides.
• Classes are almost always useless for me, unless the professor is really good. I try to go to one lecture for each professor I have to determine if I will really learn from them, then decide if I’ll go to class. The problem a live lecture as opposed to written notes or videos is that as soon as you are behind or ahead, you are put in an awkward situation. For those that do enjoy going to class, I found the best method is to prestudy the lecture material.

2. Studying the topic

When taking a test, there are 3 ways to get a question wrong:

• Lack of knowledge → “I had no idea what the answer to that question was”
• Inability to approach → “Damn it I knew that, why didn’t I think of doing it like this”
• Silly mistakes → “My calculator was in degrees not radians rip”, “2 + 2 is not 4”

I’ve listed them in the importance of solving as you study material.

Lack of Knowledge

One of the biggest mistake I’ve seen peers make is thinking that solving this means trying to memorize the entire corpus of information required in the syllabus. I see people writing, re-writing, and re-re-writing notes so that they will remember chemistry rules and exceptions.

Rote memorization sucks! You trade in understanding of the concept so that you can cram more stuff in your head. Math, physics, and computer science are really cool because you barely need any base info, everything is pretty logically derived. Other topics generally do require more knowledge, but the way to remember it isn’t through rote memorization and writing notes.

The other reason it sucks is because it’s hard to judge the relative importance of each thing you are learning. It’s much better to get a sense of this from applying/practicing instead.

My way of solving this is quickly skimming through the entire corpus. I’ll drill the things that are hard to remember a couple times (formulae, charts) but other than that I just need to show my brain that these things exist, and even if I don’t understand it completely, I know that it does exist and that I know where to find it. I’ll come back to it if I’m ever stuck.

Inability to approach

The way to solve this is to get an intuition of how problems can be framed. This means doing a bunch of practice, when you hit something you don’t understand, you go on a conquest to really understand what it means and how to apply it. Then you continue and repeat.

I’ve noticed that when doing practice a lot of people waste time on stuff they already know, and would only be messed up by a “silly mistake”, which you can’t really inhibit from practice alone. If the last step of the question is to compute an integral, and you already know how to compute an integral, stop! Don’t waste your time going through the motions for no reason other than to just do it. Personally when I see a problem, I just think of what steps I would take to solve it, ensure in my mind I’m confident in doing those steps, then just read the solution to see if I’m right.

Silly Mistakes

In my opinion this is the hardest to solve for. Mostly it is mindset when solving problems. You must be careful and exact in your actions. Ensure you know why you are doing everything and be conscious of what you are doing. Some other tips:

• Use all your time, there’s no point of stopping early if you’re not in a rush
• Double check

3. Speculation

Before a test, I find it really helpful to speculate what types of questions could be on the test. What did the teacher stress? What types of questions did they give? How can those questions be altered slightly? What content is covered? Can you think of a question type for each topic? How are past exams structured?

It’s possible to go into a test knowing generally what will be on it, and since you already know your stuff, you can