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Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

680 points by peterkshultz 11mo ago

zer0zzz 11mo ago
“Don't only hang out only with stronger students. Weaker students will have you explain things to them and you will find that teaching the material helps A LOT with understanding.” This guy really understands the human mind
mhog_hn 11mo ago
Title could also be “How to train biological neural networks” - Andrej Karpathy
logicallee 11mo ago
This doesn't have a date but I checked the wayback machine and it was first crawled in April 2013. [1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130404071259/https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/advice.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130404071259/https://cs.stanfo...
random9749832 11mo ago
I don't miss university at all. In hindsight most of it was a scam and I learnt most things on my own either by opening a book, starting my own project or through research. You don't need a 50 point list to learn anything even to a proficient level. Exams are bullshit.
Cyph0n 11mo ago
This is excellent advice. I personally rarely joined group study sessions, but thinking back, I should have joined more of them. To expand on one of the points listed here: do a first pass through questions before writing a single thing and mark which you feel are easy vs. hard (this evaluation may change once you start working on them!). Your prioritization should be: easier + higher points, easier + lower points, then hard in order of perceived difficulty weighted by points. Oh, and if your course requires memorizing a set of known formulas, write them down first thing on the very last page :)
- epolanski 11mo ago
  I've always studied with peers after classes (I'm a chemistry master) and it was the best way to learn. Discuss different ideas and approaches and understandings was a force multiplier.
constantcrying 11mo ago
Some more advice: Tests are all bullshit. They are just some arbitrary questions, trying to figure out whether you understood the material, which were made up by some guy who has much more important things to do. If you want to spend your time well, either do networking or try to understand the material. If you are there trying to game the system (which hilariously Karpathy is suggesting you do, in a very mild way) then you should seriously consider why you are there in the first place. Also consider that when you are tested outside of school you will always be tested to face to face.
- b33j0r 11mo ago
  My tests were always tricky variations on a problem, or the exact problem, which they completely solved in the TA sessions. I couldn’t figure out why I got the first B’s and C’s of my life until I realized that.
- Projectiboga 11mo ago
  Yep, and they are often scaled by the "Normal Curve". The catch with this flawed reasoning is that a Normal Distribution requires multiple independent imputs where none is deterministic. Having a professor and a curriculum are together goes against that proposition. There needs to be a better distribution to measure varation within an effective teaching method. Teaching towards a normal distributon result favors giving tests with flawed grading and other bad practices. In the late 1980s I didn't want to pursue a PHD due to the bleak future of acedemia, but if I had this would have been a major focus as it is causing a myriad of problems in our society abusing higher eduction students in this way.
- aidenn0 11mo ago
  The second half of this explains why he suggests gaming it, and seems to boil down to Grant Allen's maxim of "Don't let your schooling interfere with your education"
behnamoh 11mo ago
Ah, the thin font inspired by Apple's iOS 7 Helvetica font that ruined the readability of web content for a decade... Is there a way to enforce non-thin fonts on web pages in the browser?
- trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
  I use reader mode when typography sucks.
- wafflemaker 11mo ago
  DarkReader plugin has settings to manipulate fonts on pages, it's quite easy to configure. Assuming you are already using dark reader to give dark mode to all pages.
nomilk 11mo ago
Great find. What was he teaching back then?
- levocardia 11mo ago
  Not sure about 2013 but in 2016 he taught this gem of a class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU&list=PLkt2uSq6rBVctENoVBg1TpCC7OQi31AlC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU&list=PLkt2uSq6rB...
brosco 11mo ago
I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while. As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together? When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part. If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook. People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.
- random9749832 11mo ago
  Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. You either put in the effort to learn and struggle until you succeed or you don't. There is no secret sauce.
  - wafflemaker 11mo ago
    I've met lot of smart guys never getting anywhere, because they were always looking for a shortcut and not to do the real work. Linux instructor Jason Canon wrote once that there's a lot of people who spend 90% of the time reading articles on how to learn Linux, but only 10% really practicing. OTOH it's a really cool way to stay focused and engaged with the lecture.
levocardia 11mo ago
I love the final point: >Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. [...] Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck. While probably 90% of undergrads undershoot in terms of time spent on their courses, the other 10% "Goodhardt" their grades and misallocate their time and abilities.
Almondsetat 11mo ago
The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen. 1. Follow actively the lessons. 2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance
- sfn42 11mo ago
  They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.
  - ido 11mo ago
    I suspect the reason is that most late-teens/early-twenty-somethings are not responsible/emotionally mature enough to put in the required amount of work in the relatively free environment of university where nobody is checking if you’re doing your homework or show up to class.
    - SoftTalker 11mo ago
      Related, for me, was that high school just wasn't very challenging. I got As without ever really studying or feeling that I was working very hard. I took that approach into university and it worked for my freshman and most of my sophomore courses. Then things got actually tough and I realized I could not just intuit my way through exams, and I had never really learned how to study.
      - 9dev 11mo ago
        Failing to realise that school was just about learning how to learn was also the main mistake I made, for the same reason as you. I was always good at soaking up stuff I found interesting, but to this day learning something because I have to is hard, awful work.
    - quacked 11mo ago
Fraaaank 11mo ago
> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test. I was always told NOT to study right before the test because it hinder retrieval of long term memory.
- trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
  If the origin of that was a single study, you should learn about then replication crisis in psychology that called into question large swaths of results, after around 2/3rds of studies failed replication.
  - fn-mote 11mo ago
    Both this advice and whatever the OP recommends are both subject to the “replication crisis” critique. At least until you dig in and become confident in the reliability of the research backing the claims. No research is cited in this article. Some of the advice seems unlikely to be research-based (“drink coffee 2 hours before the exam but not right before”).
- deleted 11mo ago
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joshvm 11mo ago
One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/assessment/scaling/scaling.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/... There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.
- airstrike 11mo ago
  I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving grades.
  - buildbot 11mo ago
    It makes sense when applied across multiple instances of a test, if one cohort does terribly curve up, one really well curve them down relative to the overall distribution of scores. But yeah within a single assignment it makes no sense to force a specific distribution. (People do this maybe because they don’t understand?)
    - airstrike 11mo ago
      Even in that case it doesn't make sense. Why should the underperforming cohort be rewarded for doing poorly?
      - joshvm 11mo ago
        The idea is to identify if there is a particularly easy/hard exam and the average score of the cohort is significantly different to how they perform in other classes. "Doing poorly" is quite hard to define when none of the tests, perhaps outside of the core 1st and 2nd year modules, are standard.
alyxya 11mo ago
The most important advice is at the end. > Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study. It’s difficult to escape tunnel vision when your most urgent and highest priority task tends to be the required homework and studying you have right in front of you, and you directly get feedback on that work. > Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck. I agree with all the advice here, but in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this. These things are all something you can do away from school, so while in school, it felt like a waste to not make use of the school to do things on my own. Overall the advice is much easier said than done, even if it is something I completely agree with.
- hammock 11mo ago
  In university, how can you get a 4.0 with an 85% average? In high school they added 1.0 to honors courses but I don’t remember the same thing happening in undergrad.
  - crackalamoo 11mo ago
    Grade inflation is common at many schools. And many difficult technical classes grade on a curve, sometimes to the point where you can get an A with an 85%. But yeah, I still don't see how an 85% average would be a 4.0.
- benmercer_dev 11mo ago
  > I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this I think back to my college years (2002-2006) and I don't recall being very receptive to explicit advice even if it was realistically applicable. Even given everything I know about myself now, I struggle to imagine how I could have persuaded my 20-year-old self to do anything with words alone.
jackling 11mo ago
Lots of good advice in this article. My favorite pieces that I agree with 100%: > Reading and understanding IS NOT the same as replicating the content. This happens to me all the time. It's really important to try and replicate everything that you learn. I would go even further and constantly reaffirm that you still know how to prove facts that you take for granted. > NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early. Every time I find a mistake. Some pieces that I really disagree with: > Study very intensely RIGHT before the test. I don't think this works, at least for me, it doesn’t. I never studied on test day unless the test was in the evening. Even in cases where I had ample time to study, I focused on preparing for my later tests. By the time test day rolls around, you either know the material or you don’t. I don’t think short-term memory is as valuable as the writer is making it out to be. I also worry that the added stress may cause you to confuse yourself when trying to frantically read through your notes or textbooks. > If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, chug an energy drink. Your health is more important than the tests you take. These energy drinks are terrible for you and your brain, in my opinion. After hours of sitting, drinking such a high concentration of sugar and caffeine is terrible for you. Just go out for a walk, take a shower, and if that doesn't help, go to sleep. Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.
- sodality2 11mo ago
  > Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much. I think the trade-off of being a little jittery and possibly scoring better on an exam is probably worth it. Unless you turn it into a habit, a few hours short on sleep a month isn't going to measurably harm you. Then again, it depends on how much you stand to gain from studying those extra few hours - and it's equally important to be realistic on that quantity.
- mentos 11mo ago
  I left a test early once and my TA made it a point to tear my answers apart.
- klempner 11mo ago
  > NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early. It has been nearly 20 years, but my rule of thumb was that I wouldn't leave until I had done *three* review passes of the test. That is, quadruple checking, completing the exam and then reviewing my answers three times. That is pretty far into the diminishing returns for me catching my own errors. That *almost* never happens, but there are exceptions -- sometimes they really do give way way more time than you need, especially if you are already strong at the material in question. With that said, the key point is that the time tradeoff here for leaving early is terrible in typical college classes that have heavy weight on exams. Especially the first 10 -20 minutes of double checking is very likely worth 5+ hours of homework time or study time in terms of points towards the grade.
kevmo314 11mo ago
> All-nighters are not worth it. I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework. If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course. It is curious because Andrej recognizes this with his comments concerning coffee.
- deleted 11mo ago
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- rTX5CMRXIfFG 11mo ago
  This is an article about doing well in courses, not in making friends
  - kevmo314 11mo ago
    The course I did best at in school was the one that led to a job opportunity through some friends I made.
  - trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
    Making friends is one of the most important reasons to go to college. Friends from that era of my life later hired me into excellent jobs that changed my generational wealth. About half of my friends met their life partners during college. Several of my lifelong best friends are people I met through college friends and activities. The more career-minded might call it "networking".
    - n4r9 11mo ago
      Nevertheless, the article is specifically about doing well in courses.
- orev 11mo ago
  Why do friends need to be made through all-nighters? Could you have made the same friends by organizing study groups during regular hours, and then doing something else fun with those people in the evenings?
downboots 11mo ago
Good advice except for recommending cramming before a test or chugging coffee/energy drink. Those can backfire.
randomtoast 11mo ago
To me it seems Andrej Karpathy is like the new AI guru. In this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 he predicted the future of AI a decade ahead. Do not get me wrong, I do think he is very knowledgable on the subject.
- tehnub 11mo ago
  Is guru being used in some special sense here? Cuz Karpathy has been an AI luminary for at least 10 years. This post for instance taught RL to a whole generation https://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/ https://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/.
  - tuhgdetzhh 11mo ago
    I think he means Guru in the sense of crystal ball Guru telling you the future.
didip 11mo ago
So many “hot takes” about studying but really it comes down to 1 thing: Are you disciplined enough to have an excellent time management. That’s basically it.
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  Paraphrasing a saying that is popular among coaches: Everyone has the desire to win but very few have the will to prepare to win. Doing well in school is overwhelmingly about simply having the will to do the work. To read, listen, take notes, study, practice, and review. There's no magic.
jokellum 11mo ago
> Places with a lot of background noise are bad and have a research-supported negative impact on learning. Libraries and Reading rooms work best. This was horrible advice for me and caused my a lot of grief for many years wondering why I still couldn't focus. Nothing against Andrej, part of the reason I hate this advice is that this is very common advice for what your environment should look like. This was advice given by study workshops at my college. I'm sure this works for a decent chunk of the student population. Quiet places cause me to mentally drift into outer space and I just zone out. You know what is a great environment? Semi-busy coffee shops + headphones + instrumental music. I'm able to consistently lock in for 4-5 hours. When I go back to my "nice quiet home environment" I get distracted immediately and refocusing is super hard. Like I said, this is standard advice that works for a portion of the population, but I think this makes a ton of other people in the same boat as me feel lazy/discouraged/unfocused/stupid losers when in reality "nice quiet places" might not work for them.
stared 11mo ago
I never visited my professors or TAs during office hours. In retrospect, I see I missed free one-on-ones, not only to ask about assignments or tests, but also to talk about the big pictures, misunderstandings, etc, etc.
- ProllyInfamous 11mo ago
  I spent few semesters of college sober, mostly just coasting through intro-level courses on my way to grad school. But it was magical when I actually cared about a subject / instructor, and got to know them during group study sessions / office hours. I learnt physical chemistry from one of the co-inventors of white LED — the baddest bitch in that college town (she did not gifeAF about anything but her own incredible inventions). Her equally-brilliant husband was my academic advisor (but you would never suspect they're married) =P Our alumni network sends out a quarterly academic publication, and it's always nice to see how certain former peers/instructors "panned out" — e.g. a former classmate is now a nobel laureate (mutually-unknown, but I supported his team's hardware as a student job). My favorite are former TAs from my introductory labs that are now running their own quirky laboratories (many of us smoked.erryday.homies, at least at the time..). It was only a decade after grad school that I realized how important people / networking can be. I am not a typical graduate, but "go Dores."
marcodiego 11mo ago
I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case. In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something". I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.
- _fizz_buzz_ 11mo ago
  I always overestimate how much I can do in one day and I underestimate how much I can get done in 100 days (with the caveat that I have to work on it consistently).
- tehnub 11mo ago
  Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest: What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
lotfi-mahiddine 11mo ago
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dbacar 11mo ago
If you have it in you, none of this will matter, you will find your path anyway. If you dont have it in you, none of this will matter, you will not be able to do it anyway.
colechristensen 11mo ago
I can't pay attention during lectures. Not "this is difficult" but "I cannot keep the sentence being spoken in memory long enough to understand it". They speak too slowly and take large pauses while writing. I have found no solution for this besides watching recordings at a significantly faster speed, preferably clipping silences. I have been tested and found explicit evidence of this short term memory deficiency which healthcare providers directly refused to address instead offering childish advice about sleep and self care offering SSRIs as well.
expenses3 11mo ago
How am I meant to take this clown's advice seriously when he's the guy who invented vibe coding? Probably has been a net negative for students.
1970-01-01 11mo ago
Studying the old tests should be even higher up. A lazy prof will reuse quite a bit of their test material after a decade or two.
preett_y 11mo ago
Mxm
acetofenone 11mo ago
I find really helpful writing down by hand the key concepts or phrases I find impactful. Also I draw a lot of pictures to fix the stuff and link it with arrows to show the line of thought
neilv 11mo ago
Some good advice, but two of the pieces surprised me: > Go to the prof before final exam at least once for office hours. - Even if you have no questions (make something up!) Profs will sometimes be willing to say more about a test in 1on1 basis (things they would not disclose in front of the entire class). Don't expect it, but when this does happen, it helps a lot. Does this give you an unfair advantage over other students? Sometimes. It's a little shady :) But in general it is a good idea to let the prof get to know you at least a little. Were I a professor, and a student showed up to my office hours, to disingenuous BS me (e.g., making something up to get face time to advance their sociopath career, or to try to get exclusive hints on the exam), that would not be to their advantage. ProTip: I wouldn't be thinking "What a wonderfully go-getter young person; I should write them a good recommendation, to help them gain more influence. Stanford hasn't inflicted nearly enough people like this upon the world." > If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, jug an energy drink. - They work. It's just chemistry.* Half of the students are already drugged to the gills. Students don't need celebrity alum endorsement of that. You don't want people graduading as drugged-out zombies and narcissists, to then go on to found or lead sociopathic companies that make society worse.
- Cpoll 11mo ago
  > sociopath career If someone's seems obviously a sociopath from a single innocuous interaction, they're probably not a real sociopath. I'm not sure what the litmus test is for a "made-up" question vs. a genuine question based on the course material; the only difference is whether the student already knows the answer. I think we're a bit too eager to throw around "sociopath." When I nod along to my boss' vacation story and ask him follow-up questions, I guess that also makes me a sociopath, because he's not a good storyteller and I'm not interested in Machu Picchu (this is a made up anecdote for illustrative purposes). Were you a professor you might also be a bit more sympathetic to the pressure academia puts on students to make them suck up like this. > Half of the students are already drugged to the gills. He did advocate ample sleep and not pulling all-nighters, near the top of the article.
  - neilv 11mo ago
    Not sociopaths, but sociopathic careers, as a term of condemnation. And a lot of people light up the BS detector like they wouldn't believe. Loosely put, the majority of them fit the stereotype who think that everyone is ruthlessly self-interested, but they don't think of it as ruthless, and they think of themselves and the others as (in Bay Area stereotype, for example) nice and cheerful and progressive. Their vague awareness not to be crass about it, according to the social conventions they've gotten in their peer groups thus far, is insufficient to hide it. But others of them think they are "the alpha", and believe themselves to be more aggressive than others, and more meritorious. Yet, of the ones I've noticed (and this might be why I noticed them), they're not as smart as they think they are, when they try to manipulate, and don't know how to fake being someone they aren't. They instead lean on family money and connections, alliances with power structures, gaming, underhandedness, aggressiveness, etc. Though I knew one very smart and very charismatic ruthless person, who was smart enough to avoid the tells, so I know they exist. One way of describing it is that they could play parts of different personalities, thinking of things the personality would think of, as needed for different audiences. Once they started tipping their hand, it was too late to stop them, and society is significantly worse for it. I speculate that these people are a very small minority, because I think otherwise they would have taken over more positions of power. Yet we can see that many powerful tech companies are headed by people who obviously do not have these qualities of brains, charisma, and empathy. Maybe the non-ruthless ones become great writers, actors, and teachers instead.
commandersaki 11mo ago
My tip is if you're doing well in courses, ratchet it up with more challenging courses maybe outside of your major or take some proof heavy graduate courses (if in compsci/math).
dsamy 11mo ago
While Andrej's advice may offer useful tips, it's important to consider that success strategies can vary significantly among individuals. What works for one person might not work for another due to different learning styles, backgrounds, and circumstances. Additionally, the educational landscape has evolved since 2013, so some advice may be outdated. Always critically evaluate any guidance and adapt it to your personal situation.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  That has been said more than once - but research fails to back it up in general. You are not that different from others.
foofoo12 11mo ago
> It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning. If you really try to solve a problem and then put it away for a day or two, you'll often find that your brain has done some good background processing on the problem. I've experienced it multiple times and one of our professors recommended it as a "trick of the trade". But you have to do an serious attempt to solve the problem before you can send it to the background thread.
- godshatter 11mo ago
  When I was cramming for a test the day before I would use an accelerated version of this. I would work on something difficult for maybe an hour or so, then go do something fun for a few minutes that required focus. Going for a walk just left me continually trying to work on the problem while I walked. Back in the day I would play pool (had access to a pool table nearby). These days, I'd go play a video game that took skill and focus. I'd do this for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and hit that problem again. It didn't always work, but sometimes time pressures caused me to fall into a mental rut and when you're in one all you can seem to do is dig deeper.
deleted 11mo ago
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unit149 11mo ago
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hufdr 11mo ago
Although this advice is quite comprehensive, I think it assumes that you've already kept up with the pace of the course. In some schools, the curriculum moves so fast that students are thrown into problem sets before they’ve even grasped the basics. I’d love to see how he would advise someone who's already fallen behind and trying to catch up. For many people, that’s the more realistic situation.
- jama211 11mo ago
  This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different. That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t apply for those. But I got various positions and my career took off just fine. Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable. So, it’s important to remember that learning in university is important but if you don’t get amazing grades it’s not something people should stress about too much IMO.
  - 121789 11mo ago
    Plenty of places ask for GPA for university graduates, and a low ine is disqualifying. After a few years no one will ever care again, again unless you want to go to a grad school like an MBA, where a very low GPA can again be disqualifying
    - skeeter2020 11mo ago
      maybe if you want to attend a top MBA program at some schools, but since it's intended for a diverse range of undergrad degrees and there are a million MBA programs you can find one that will let you in. They also focus on your final coursework where most people have by then learned how to get at least decent grades and your GMAT score so a couple of early bad years won't disqualify you.
    - jama211 11mo ago
thefaux 11mo ago
Chalk it up to youth perhaps, but this piece would benefit, in my view, from more "for me..." or "I found..." and less "You should/must/are..." I have reached a point in my life in which I recognize that I do not generally appreciate direct advice, especially not the unsolicited variety. Even the bits that I agree with in this piece are tainted by the many cases where I did the exact opposite of what he advises and excelled academically.
- tibbar 11mo ago
  > Having been tested for many years of my life (with pretty good results), here are some rules of thumb that I feel helped me Oh, come now, I think Karpathy adequately qualifies his advice. :-)
ropable 11mo ago
Looking back at my time at university, I have to admit that I mainly attended group study sessions in order to spend more time with the attractive singles in our course. This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others. That in turn led to 1) a reasonable side-hustle in tutoring and 2) dating and marrying my wife.
- screenoridesagb 11mo ago
  [dead]
- dvrj101 11mo ago
  > I mainly attended group yup
- agnishom 11mo ago
  > I mainly attended group study sessions in order to spend more time with the attractive singles This is the plot of the brilliant tv show _Community_
- KronisLV 11mo ago
  > This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others. The few times when someone tried to explain things to me live, lead to my brain just kinda blanking because of the time pressure and whatnot and it wasn't very useful for me. Instead, if I wanted to learn something properly, I'd have to just dig into the material myself and iterate on it. Consulting others worked better over text, in a group chat or forum or whatever. I could only discuss a topic when I already had good grasp of it and felt confident about it. At that point it was more for the benefit of others, outside of finding niche cases that I didn't run into myself.
  - CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
    Same here. People trying to share information I have no interest in? Impossible to learn. My brain finding some interesting topic? Impossible to avoid ingesting all the knowledge about it. Makes the first ~18 years of your life kind of difficult, as school basically is mostly the first part with not so much the second, but once you complete school or drop out to start working, being able to do the second part seems like a godsend compared to your peers.
arjie 11mo ago
Fascinating. I wondered if this would suggest note-taking in lectures (it doesn't). This is something I never did and then finally I bent to everyone saying it's the most important thing and I did awfully in Algebraic Geometry. I had to return to my old technique of just paying 100% attention with 0% note taking, and then creating short cheat sheets of techniques in LaTeX before the exam. This is the first time I've come across any college advice that does not mention this and I'm glad for it. I just never got good at note-taking to be able to properly pay attention to the lecture.
- jeffreygoesto 11mo ago
  I did not, it distracted me from listening. One of the key things to do was to do and not only read as many exercises as possible, including the old ones of the same professor. Then going back to reading the material once you got stuck. Most of the time I studied with a good friend who had to go to the army and did not want to lose those years. So I prepared everything during the semester and taught it to him when he took some days off before the exams. Tough times but worked well for both of us. A very good focus operator for exams was to ask the TA questions in the last exercises. The topics they answered quickly had a high chance of being relevant, because they had prepared them for the exams.
  - bananaflag 11mo ago
    I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).
    - shortrounddev2 11mo ago
      Depends on your note-taking strategy. I would just transcribe what the professor was saying and ended up not paying attention. I turned my brain into a transcription machine and didn't take any time to grok anything I heard, then I had to re-read the textbook later. Nobody ever "taught" me how to study, so I was bad at it. Failed my way through high school and dropped out of college
sd9 11mo ago
I had to study for significantly longer than 6 days to barely scrape a 2:1 in my degree. Perhaps I hadn’t optimised my caffeine consumption.
lr4444lr 11mo ago
Even if you're not allowed to bring it to the exam. Writing things down helps. What you want is to cram the entire course on 1 or more pages that you can in the end tile in front of you and say with high degree of confidence "This is exactly everything I must know" Reminds me of this comedy bit in an American sitcom from about 35 years ago where the dumb kid when asked how his history test said it went okay but admitted he cheated. He explained that he tried to write down everything on his arm, there was not enough room despite multiple attempts at it. Then he realized he was starting to remember some of the content after the several rewrites, and said "so I just did it that way! I hid it all in my head and it was great! The professor didn't even know that I was cheating because there was no evidence!"
- pavel_lishin 11mo ago
  This sounds like something Reese from "Malcolm in the Middle" would do and say.
- ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 11mo ago
  I went to a concert recently and naturally they don’t let you bring alcohol in to the venue. So I very smartly decided to store the alcohol in my belly before I got there. Security had no idea how hard I bamboozled them.
Leoluc 11mo ago
" Study well in advance. Did I mention this already? Maybe I should stress it again. The brain really needs time to absorb material. Things that looked hard become easier with time. You want to alocate ~3 days for midterms, ~6 days for exams. " Are you kidding? Don't expect to pass the calculus 3 exam I took as a Physics Engineer at Politecnico di Milano with less that one month (keep in mind: bare minimum) of studying ahead of the exam (lectures not included): If you could actually get good grades with what Andrej said, I totally chose the wrong university.
- tim333 11mo ago
  In my physics group in Cambridge there was one student who was way better than the rest of us at physics although only normally bright at stuff outside of physics and the thing that was different about her was her dad was a physics prof and she was probably exposed to the advanced ideas a kid. I think in the same way kids pick up languages more easily than adults they may pick up other intellectual stuff.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    It matters what topics are taught in elementary school, and how they are taught. We as society need to figure out what is going to be important in 40 years (when current kids are 45-50 years old) and ensure those things are started so they slowly have time to get the concepts. I can be reasonably confident that logical thinking will be important, which you can get from Math (philosophy also has logic - is that useful too? My background is math so I don't know about that side). I'm sure other parts of math will be useful but not what. The BASIC I learned in school was worthless (it would have been useful as an introduction if my teachers didn't teach/test so many "facts" that were wrong - I was too shy to tell them that back then and now I'm mature enough to know I'd get in trouble without changing anything so there was no point)
OhioMan2943 11mo ago
I love metacognitive approaches to learning- much more interesting for people like me who get bored by the actual material pretty quickly
ninthedition 11mo ago
Article says: > TESTS: ON DAY OF > Study very intensely RIGHT before the test. > DURING THE TEST I have one other hack, really helpful and fully legal: As soon as the test starts, do a braindump onto scrap paper, especially the items just crammed beforehand. That effectively produces a cheat sheet, which is easiest to do when the information is freshest. Also, as fatigue sets in, it is harder to recall lots of facts, so doing a braindump as the very first task was a big win for me.

680 points by peterkshultz 11mo ago

“Don't only hang out only with stronger students. Weaker students will have you explain things to them and you will find that teaching the material helps A LOT with understanding.” This guy really understands the human mind

mhog_hn 11mo ago

Title could also be “How to train biological neural networks” - Andrej Karpathy

logicallee 11mo ago

This doesn't have a date but I checked the wayback machine and it was first crawled in April 2013. [1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130404071259/https://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/advice.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130404071259/https://cs.stanfo...

random9749832 11mo ago

I don't miss university at all. In hindsight most of it was a scam and I learnt most things on my own either by opening a book, starting my own project or through research. You don't need a 50 point list to learn anything even to a proficient level. Exams are bullshit.

Cyph0n 11mo ago

This is excellent advice. I personally rarely joined group study sessions, but thinking back, I should have joined more of them. To expand on one of the points listed here: do a first pass through questions before writing a single thing and mark which you feel are easy vs. hard (this evaluation may change once you start working on them!). Your prioritization should be: easier + higher points, easier + lower points, then hard in order of perceived difficulty weighted by points. Oh, and if your course requires memorizing a set of known formulas, write them down first thing on the very last page :)

epolanski 11mo ago
I've always studied with peers after classes (I'm a chemistry master) and it was the best way to learn. Discuss different ideas and approaches and understandings was a force multiplier.

constantcrying 11mo ago

Some more advice: Tests are all bullshit. They are just some arbitrary questions, trying to figure out whether you understood the material, which were made up by some guy who has much more important things to do. If you want to spend your time well, either do networking or try to understand the material. If you are there trying to game the system (which hilariously Karpathy is suggesting you do, in a very mild way) then you should seriously consider why you are there in the first place. Also consider that when you are tested outside of school you will always be tested to face to face.

b33j0r 11mo ago
My tests were always tricky variations on a problem, or the exact problem, which they completely solved in the TA sessions. I couldn’t figure out why I got the first B’s and C’s of my life until I realized that.
Projectiboga 11mo ago
Yep, and they are often scaled by the "Normal Curve". The catch with this flawed reasoning is that a Normal Distribution requires multiple independent imputs where none is deterministic. Having a professor and a curriculum are together goes against that proposition. There needs to be a better distribution to measure varation within an effective teaching method. Teaching towards a normal distributon result favors giving tests with flawed grading and other bad practices. In the late 1980s I didn't want to pursue a PHD due to the bleak future of acedemia, but if I had this would have been a major focus as it is causing a myriad of problems in our society abusing higher eduction students in this way.
aidenn0 11mo ago
The second half of this explains why he suggests gaming it, and seems to boil down to Grant Allen's maxim of "Don't let your schooling interfere with your education"

behnamoh 11mo ago

Ah, the thin font inspired by Apple's iOS 7 Helvetica font that ruined the readability of web content for a decade... Is there a way to enforce non-thin fonts on web pages in the browser?

trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
I use reader mode when typography sucks.
wafflemaker 11mo ago
DarkReader plugin has settings to manipulate fonts on pages, it's quite easy to configure. Assuming you are already using dark reader to give dark mode to all pages.

nomilk 11mo ago

Great find. What was he teaching back then?

levocardia 11mo ago
Not sure about 2013 but in 2016 he taught this gem of a class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU&list=PLkt2uSq6rBVctENoVBg1TpCC7OQi31AlC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnWJUyUJYU&list=PLkt2uSq6rB...

brosco 11mo ago

I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while. As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track of how things fit into the big picture. For example in a math class, there may be a big theorem that they're working towards using lots of smaller lemmas. How will it all come together? When you get it right, it will feel like you are figuring out the material on your own, rather than having it explained to you. This is the most important part. If you can manage to stay one step ahead of the lecturer, it will keep you way more engaged than trying to write everything down. Writing puts you one step behind what the speaker is saying. Because of this, I usually don't take any notes at all. It obviously works better when lecture notes are made available, but you can always look at the textbook. People often assume that I have read the material or otherwise prepared for lectures, seminars, etc., because of how closely I follow what the speaker is saying. But really most talks are quite logical, and if you stay engaged it's easy to follow along. The key is to not zone out or break your concentration, and I find this method helps me immensely.

random9749832 11mo ago
Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. You either put in the effort to learn and struggle until you succeed or you don't. There is no secret sauce.
- wafflemaker 11mo ago
  I've met lot of smart guys never getting anywhere, because they were always looking for a shortcut and not to do the real work. Linux instructor Jason Canon wrote once that there's a lot of people who spend 90% of the time reading articles on how to learn Linux, but only 10% really practicing. OTOH it's a really cool way to stay focused and engaged with the lecture.

levocardia 11mo ago

I love the final point: >Your time is a precious, limited resource. Get to a point where you don't screw up on a test and then switch your attention to much more important endeavors. [...] Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck. While probably 90% of undergrads undershoot in terms of time spent on their courses, the other 10% "Goodhardt" their grades and misallocate their time and abilities.

Almondsetat 11mo ago

The real truth is that the good advice has always been dispensed, it's just that students don't want to listen. 1. Follow actively the lessons. 2. Study and exercise every day what you covered in the previous lessons Every one of us has been given these age old platitudes, but, as spaced repetition, testing, and active recall prove, they are actually an excellent starting point for good performance

sfn42 11mo ago
They told us which chapters to read before each lecture, nobody else that I knew did it. I did. It was super helpful.
- ido 11mo ago
  I suspect the reason is that most late-teens/early-twenty-somethings are not responsible/emotionally mature enough to put in the required amount of work in the relatively free environment of university where nobody is checking if you’re doing your homework or show up to class.
  - SoftTalker 11mo ago
    Related, for me, was that high school just wasn't very challenging. I got As without ever really studying or feeling that I was working very hard. I took that approach into university and it worked for my freshman and most of my sophomore courses. Then things got actually tough and I realized I could not just intuit my way through exams, and I had never really learned how to study.
    - 9dev 11mo ago
      Failing to realise that school was just about learning how to learn was also the main mistake I made, for the same reason as you. I was always good at soaking up stuff I found interesting, but to this day learning something because I have to is hard, awful work.
  - quacked 11mo ago

Fraaaank 11mo ago

> Study very intensely RIGHT before the test. I was always told NOT to study right before the test because it hinder retrieval of long term memory.

trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
If the origin of that was a single study, you should learn about then replication crisis in psychology that called into question large swaths of results, after around 2/3rds of studies failed replication.
- fn-mote 11mo ago
  Both this advice and whatever the OP recommends are both subject to the “replication crisis” critique. At least until you dig in and become confident in the reliability of the research backing the claims. No research is cited in this article. Some of the advice seems unlikely to be research-based (“drink coffee 2 hours before the exam but not right before”).
deleted 11mo ago
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joshvm 11mo ago

One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/assessment/scaling/scaling.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/general/... There were several courses that were considered easy, and as a consequence were well attended. You had to do significantly better in those classes to get a high grade, versus a low-attendance hard course where 50% in the test was curved up to 75%.

airstrike 11mo ago
I don't think I'll ever understand/accept the idea of curving grades.
- buildbot 11mo ago
  It makes sense when applied across multiple instances of a test, if one cohort does terribly curve up, one really well curve them down relative to the overall distribution of scores. But yeah within a single assignment it makes no sense to force a specific distribution. (People do this maybe because they don’t understand?)
  - airstrike 11mo ago
    Even in that case it doesn't make sense. Why should the underperforming cohort be rewarded for doing poorly?
    - joshvm 11mo ago
      The idea is to identify if there is a particularly easy/hard exam and the average score of the cohort is significantly different to how they perform in other classes. "Doing poorly" is quite hard to define when none of the tests, perhaps outside of the core 1st and 2nd year modules, are standard.

alyxya 11mo ago

The most important advice is at the end. > Undergrads tend to have tunnel vision about their classes. They want to get good grades, etc. The crucial fact to realize is that noone will care about your grades, unless they are bad. For example, I always used to say that the smartest student will get 85% in all of his courses. This way, you end up with somewhere around 4.0 score, but you did not over-study, and you did not under-study. It’s difficult to escape tunnel vision when your most urgent and highest priority task tends to be the required homework and studying you have right in front of you, and you directly get feedback on that work. > Other than research projects, get involved with some group of people on side projects or better, start your own from scratch. Contribute to Open Source, make/improve a library. Get out there and create (or help create) something cool. Document it well. Blog about it. These are the things people will care about a few years down the road. Your grades? They are an annoyance you have to deal with along the way. Use your time well and good luck. I agree with all the advice here, but in hindsight, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this. These things are all something you can do away from school, so while in school, it felt like a waste to not make use of the school to do things on my own. Overall the advice is much easier said than done, even if it is something I completely agree with.

hammock 11mo ago
In university, how can you get a 4.0 with an 85% average? In high school they added 1.0 to honors courses but I don’t remember the same thing happening in undergrad.
- crackalamoo 11mo ago
  Grade inflation is common at many schools. And many difficult technical classes grade on a curve, sometimes to the point where you can get an A with an 85%. But yeah, I still don't see how an 85% average would be a 4.0.
benmercer_dev 11mo ago
> I don’t know if I would’ve been able to realistically do this I think back to my college years (2002-2006) and I don't recall being very receptive to explicit advice even if it was realistically applicable. Even given everything I know about myself now, I struggle to imagine how I could have persuaded my 20-year-old self to do anything with words alone.

jackling 11mo ago

Lots of good advice in this article. My favorite pieces that I agree with 100%: > Reading and understanding IS NOT the same as replicating the content. This happens to me all the time. It's really important to try and replicate everything that you learn. I would go even further and constantly reaffirm that you still know how to prove facts that you take for granted. > NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early. Every time I find a mistake. Some pieces that I really disagree with: > Study very intensely RIGHT before the test. I don't think this works, at least for me, it doesn’t. I never studied on test day unless the test was in the evening. Even in cases where I had ample time to study, I focused on preparing for my later tests. By the time test day rolls around, you either know the material or you don’t. I don’t think short-term memory is as valuable as the writer is making it out to be. I also worry that the added stress may cause you to confuse yourself when trying to frantically read through your notes or textbooks. > If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, chug an energy drink. Your health is more important than the tests you take. These energy drinks are terrible for you and your brain, in my opinion. After hours of sitting, drinking such a high concentration of sugar and caffeine is terrible for you. Just go out for a walk, take a shower, and if that doesn't help, go to sleep. Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.

sodality2 11mo ago
> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much. I think the trade-off of being a little jittery and possibly scoring better on an exam is probably worth it. Unless you turn it into a habit, a few hours short on sleep a month isn't going to measurably harm you. Then again, it depends on how much you stand to gain from studying those extra few hours - and it's equally important to be realistic on that quantity.
mentos 11mo ago
I left a test early once and my TA made it a point to tear my answers apart.
klempner 11mo ago
> NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early. It has been nearly 20 years, but my rule of thumb was that I wouldn't leave until I had done *three* review passes of the test. That is, quadruple checking, completing the exam and then reviewing my answers three times. That is pretty far into the diminishing returns for me catching my own errors. That *almost* never happens, but there are exceptions -- sometimes they really do give way way more time than you need, especially if you are already strong at the material in question. With that said, the key point is that the time tradeoff here for leaving early is terrible in typical college classes that have heavy weight on exams. Especially the first 10 -20 minutes of double checking is very likely worth 5+ hours of homework time or study time in terms of points towards the grade.

kevmo314 11mo ago

> All-nighters are not worth it. I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework. If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course. It is curious because Andrej recognizes this with his comments concerning coffee.

deleted 11mo ago
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rTX5CMRXIfFG 11mo ago
This is an article about doing well in courses, not in making friends
- kevmo314 11mo ago
  The course I did best at in school was the one that led to a job opportunity through some friends I made.
- trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
  Making friends is one of the most important reasons to go to college. Friends from that era of my life later hired me into excellent jobs that changed my generational wealth. About half of my friends met their life partners during college. Several of my lifelong best friends are people I met through college friends and activities. The more career-minded might call it "networking".
  - n4r9 11mo ago
    Nevertheless, the article is specifically about doing well in courses.
orev 11mo ago
Why do friends need to be made through all-nighters? Could you have made the same friends by organizing study groups during regular hours, and then doing something else fun with those people in the evenings?

downboots 11mo ago

Good advice except for recommending cramming before a test or chugging coffee/energy drink. Those can backfire.

randomtoast 11mo ago

To me it seems Andrej Karpathy is like the new AI guru. In this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329 he predicted the future of AI a decade ahead. Do not get me wrong, I do think he is very knowledgable on the subject.

tehnub 11mo ago
Is guru being used in some special sense here? Cuz Karpathy has been an AI luminary for at least 10 years. This post for instance taught RL to a whole generation https://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/ https://karpathy.github.io/2016/05/31/rl/.
- tuhgdetzhh 11mo ago
  I think he means Guru in the sense of crystal ball Guru telling you the future.

didip 11mo ago

So many “hot takes” about studying but really it comes down to 1 thing: Are you disciplined enough to have an excellent time management. That’s basically it.

SoftTalker 11mo ago
Paraphrasing a saying that is popular among coaches: Everyone has the desire to win but very few have the will to prepare to win. Doing well in school is overwhelmingly about simply having the will to do the work. To read, listen, take notes, study, practice, and review. There's no magic.

jokellum 11mo ago

> Places with a lot of background noise are bad and have a research-supported negative impact on learning. Libraries and Reading rooms work best. This was horrible advice for me and caused my a lot of grief for many years wondering why I still couldn't focus. Nothing against Andrej, part of the reason I hate this advice is that this is very common advice for what your environment should look like. This was advice given by study workshops at my college. I'm sure this works for a decent chunk of the student population. Quiet places cause me to mentally drift into outer space and I just zone out. You know what is a great environment? Semi-busy coffee shops + headphones + instrumental music. I'm able to consistently lock in for 4-5 hours. When I go back to my "nice quiet home environment" I get distracted immediately and refocusing is super hard. Like I said, this is standard advice that works for a portion of the population, but I think this makes a ton of other people in the same boat as me feel lazy/discouraged/unfocused/stupid losers when in reality "nice quiet places" might not work for them.

stared 11mo ago

I never visited my professors or TAs during office hours. In retrospect, I see I missed free one-on-ones, not only to ask about assignments or tests, but also to talk about the big pictures, misunderstandings, etc, etc.

ProllyInfamous 11mo ago
I spent few semesters of college sober, mostly just coasting through intro-level courses on my way to grad school. But it was magical when I actually cared about a subject / instructor, and got to know them during group study sessions / office hours. I learnt physical chemistry from one of the co-inventors of white LED — the baddest bitch in that college town (she did not gifeAF about anything but her own incredible inventions). Her equally-brilliant husband was my academic advisor (but you would never suspect they're married) =P Our alumni network sends out a quarterly academic publication, and it's always nice to see how certain former peers/instructors "panned out" — e.g. a former classmate is now a nobel laureate (mutually-unknown, but I supported his team's hardware as a student job). My favorite are former TAs from my introductory labs that are now running their own quirky laboratories (many of us smoked.erryday.homies, at least at the time..). It was only a decade after grad school that I realized how important people / networking can be. I am not a typical graduate, but "go Dores."

marcodiego 11mo ago

I have some friends who say that "learning to learn" (the skill and the book with the same title) is key to being successful; specially if you're not a genius. Through my whole life, I met people who seemed nowhere near as bright as me but eventually got to surpass me both in academia and at work. From what I could observe about these people, the main difference was regularity; these people studied or wrote code every single day; they took small steps, but never stopped. Also there was the point of asking for help, not to get the answer, but to find a way out. There's also the "curse of the genius", but I don't think that is the case. In the moments I was struggling the most in my life, what helped me the most was managing my time and finding ways to work a little bit every day, even if it was only writing down the plan of what I had to do. Pomodoro timers also helped me a lot to "start doing something". I really think motivational, self improvement, anti-procrastination and studying advice courses should be offered by universities. I'm convinced that regularity and a good study strategy is enough to move even the weakest among the mediocres to attain a doctorate level. I saw some cases like these myself.

_fizz_buzz_ 11mo ago
I always overestimate how much I can do in one day and I underestimate how much I can get done in 100 days (with the caveat that I have to work on it consistently).
tehnub 11mo ago
Richard Hamming in his "You and Your Research" talk compares it to compound interest: What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

lotfi-mahiddine 11mo ago

[dead]

dbacar 11mo ago

If you have it in you, none of this will matter, you will find your path anyway. If you dont have it in you, none of this will matter, you will not be able to do it anyway.

colechristensen 11mo ago

I can't pay attention during lectures. Not "this is difficult" but "I cannot keep the sentence being spoken in memory long enough to understand it". They speak too slowly and take large pauses while writing. I have found no solution for this besides watching recordings at a significantly faster speed, preferably clipping silences. I have been tested and found explicit evidence of this short term memory deficiency which healthcare providers directly refused to address instead offering childish advice about sleep and self care offering SSRIs as well.

expenses3 11mo ago

How am I meant to take this clown's advice seriously when he's the guy who invented vibe coding? Probably has been a net negative for students.

1970-01-01 11mo ago

Studying the old tests should be even higher up. A lazy prof will reuse quite a bit of their test material after a decade or two.

preett_y 11mo ago

Mxm

acetofenone 11mo ago

I find really helpful writing down by hand the key concepts or phrases I find impactful. Also I draw a lot of pictures to fix the stuff and link it with arrows to show the line of thought

neilv 11mo ago

Some good advice, but two of the pieces surprised me: > Go to the prof before final exam at least once for office hours. - Even if you have no questions (make something up!) Profs will sometimes be willing to say more about a test in 1on1 basis (things they would not disclose in front of the entire class). Don't expect it, but when this does happen, it helps a lot. Does this give you an unfair advantage over other students? Sometimes. It's a little shady :) But in general it is a good idea to let the prof get to know you at least a little. Were I a professor, and a student showed up to my office hours, to disingenuous BS me (e.g., making something up to get face time to advance their sociopath career, or to try to get exclusive hints on the exam), that would not be to their advantage. ProTip: I wouldn't be thinking "What a wonderfully go-getter young person; I should write them a good recommendation, to help them gain more influence. Stanford hasn't inflicted nearly enough people like this upon the world." > If things are going badly and you get too tired, in emergency situations, jug an energy drink. - They work. It's just chemistry.* Half of the students are already drugged to the gills. Students don't need celebrity alum endorsement of that. You don't want people graduading as drugged-out zombies and narcissists, to then go on to found or lead sociopathic companies that make society worse.

Cpoll 11mo ago
> sociopath career If someone's seems obviously a sociopath from a single innocuous interaction, they're probably not a real sociopath. I'm not sure what the litmus test is for a "made-up" question vs. a genuine question based on the course material; the only difference is whether the student already knows the answer. I think we're a bit too eager to throw around "sociopath." When I nod along to my boss' vacation story and ask him follow-up questions, I guess that also makes me a sociopath, because he's not a good storyteller and I'm not interested in Machu Picchu (this is a made up anecdote for illustrative purposes). Were you a professor you might also be a bit more sympathetic to the pressure academia puts on students to make them suck up like this. > Half of the students are already drugged to the gills. He did advocate ample sleep and not pulling all-nighters, near the top of the article.
- neilv 11mo ago
  Not sociopaths, but sociopathic careers, as a term of condemnation. And a lot of people light up the BS detector like they wouldn't believe. Loosely put, the majority of them fit the stereotype who think that everyone is ruthlessly self-interested, but they don't think of it as ruthless, and they think of themselves and the others as (in Bay Area stereotype, for example) nice and cheerful and progressive. Their vague awareness not to be crass about it, according to the social conventions they've gotten in their peer groups thus far, is insufficient to hide it. But others of them think they are "the alpha", and believe themselves to be more aggressive than others, and more meritorious. Yet, of the ones I've noticed (and this might be why I noticed them), they're not as smart as they think they are, when they try to manipulate, and don't know how to fake being someone they aren't. They instead lean on family money and connections, alliances with power structures, gaming, underhandedness, aggressiveness, etc. Though I knew one very smart and very charismatic ruthless person, who was smart enough to avoid the tells, so I know they exist. One way of describing it is that they could play parts of different personalities, thinking of things the personality would think of, as needed for different audiences. Once they started tipping their hand, it was too late to stop them, and society is significantly worse for it. I speculate that these people are a very small minority, because I think otherwise they would have taken over more positions of power. Yet we can see that many powerful tech companies are headed by people who obviously do not have these qualities of brains, charisma, and empathy. Maybe the non-ruthless ones become great writers, actors, and teachers instead.

commandersaki 11mo ago

My tip is if you're doing well in courses, ratchet it up with more challenging courses maybe outside of your major or take some proof heavy graduate courses (if in compsci/math).

dsamy 11mo ago

While Andrej's advice may offer useful tips, it's important to consider that success strategies can vary significantly among individuals. What works for one person might not work for another due to different learning styles, backgrounds, and circumstances. Additionally, the educational landscape has evolved since 2013, so some advice may be outdated. Always critically evaluate any guidance and adapt it to your personal situation.

bluGill 11mo ago
That has been said more than once - but research fails to back it up in general. You are not that different from others.

foofoo12 11mo ago

> It has happened to me several times that I was stuck on some problem for an hour in the night, but was able to solve it in 5 minutes in the morning. If you really try to solve a problem and then put it away for a day or two, you'll often find that your brain has done some good background processing on the problem. I've experienced it multiple times and one of our professors recommended it as a "trick of the trade". But you have to do an serious attempt to solve the problem before you can send it to the background thread.

godshatter 11mo ago
When I was cramming for a test the day before I would use an accelerated version of this. I would work on something difficult for maybe an hour or so, then go do something fun for a few minutes that required focus. Going for a walk just left me continually trying to work on the problem while I walked. Back in the day I would play pool (had access to a pool table nearby). These days, I'd go play a video game that took skill and focus. I'd do this for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and hit that problem again. It didn't always work, but sometimes time pressures caused me to fall into a mental rut and when you're in one all you can seem to do is dig deeper.

deleted 11mo ago

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unit149 11mo ago

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hufdr 11mo ago

Although this advice is quite comprehensive, I think it assumes that you've already kept up with the pace of the course. In some schools, the curriculum moves so fast that students are thrown into problem sets before they’ve even grasped the basics. I’d love to see how he would advise someone who's already fallen behind and trying to catch up. For many people, that’s the more realistic situation.

jama211 11mo ago
This advice is aimed at students who are already getting good-great grades but want to optimise further. Advice for students that get poor grades is quite different. That being said my grades in university were middling to poor and once I got out I applied for jobs with my degree in hand and not a single one asked for my academic transcript. Perhaps more prestigious graduate positions might have, but I just didn’t apply for those. But I got various positions and my career took off just fine. Now the idea that anyone would care about my university grades seems laughable. So, it’s important to remember that learning in university is important but if you don’t get amazing grades it’s not something people should stress about too much IMO.
- 121789 11mo ago
  Plenty of places ask for GPA for university graduates, and a low ine is disqualifying. After a few years no one will ever care again, again unless you want to go to a grad school like an MBA, where a very low GPA can again be disqualifying
  - skeeter2020 11mo ago
    maybe if you want to attend a top MBA program at some schools, but since it's intended for a diverse range of undergrad degrees and there are a million MBA programs you can find one that will let you in. They also focus on your final coursework where most people have by then learned how to get at least decent grades and your GMAT score so a couple of early bad years won't disqualify you.
  - jama211 11mo ago

thefaux 11mo ago

Chalk it up to youth perhaps, but this piece would benefit, in my view, from more "for me..." or "I found..." and less "You should/must/are..." I have reached a point in my life in which I recognize that I do not generally appreciate direct advice, especially not the unsolicited variety. Even the bits that I agree with in this piece are tainted by the many cases where I did the exact opposite of what he advises and excelled academically.

tibbar 11mo ago
> Having been tested for many years of my life (with pretty good results), here are some rules of thumb that I feel helped me Oh, come now, I think Karpathy adequately qualifies his advice. :-)

ropable 11mo ago

Looking back at my time at university, I have to admit that I mainly attended group study sessions in order to spend more time with the attractive singles in our course. This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others. That in turn led to 1) a reasonable side-hustle in tutoring and 2) dating and marrying my wife.

screenoridesagb 11mo ago
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dvrj101 11mo ago
> I mainly attended group yup
agnishom 11mo ago
> I mainly attended group study sessions in order to spend more time with the attractive singles This is the plot of the brilliant tv show _Community_
KronisLV 11mo ago
> This had the accidental benefit of forcing me to study and discuss the material more (which led to better understanding) so that I could help coach others. The few times when someone tried to explain things to me live, lead to my brain just kinda blanking because of the time pressure and whatnot and it wasn't very useful for me. Instead, if I wanted to learn something properly, I'd have to just dig into the material myself and iterate on it. Consulting others worked better over text, in a group chat or forum or whatever. I could only discuss a topic when I already had good grasp of it and felt confident about it. At that point it was more for the benefit of others, outside of finding niche cases that I didn't run into myself.
- CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
  Same here. People trying to share information I have no interest in? Impossible to learn. My brain finding some interesting topic? Impossible to avoid ingesting all the knowledge about it. Makes the first ~18 years of your life kind of difficult, as school basically is mostly the first part with not so much the second, but once you complete school or drop out to start working, being able to do the second part seems like a godsend compared to your peers.

arjie 11mo ago

Fascinating. I wondered if this would suggest note-taking in lectures (it doesn't). This is something I never did and then finally I bent to everyone saying it's the most important thing and I did awfully in Algebraic Geometry. I had to return to my old technique of just paying 100% attention with 0% note taking, and then creating short cheat sheets of techniques in LaTeX before the exam. This is the first time I've come across any college advice that does not mention this and I'm glad for it. I just never got good at note-taking to be able to properly pay attention to the lecture.

jeffreygoesto 11mo ago
I did not, it distracted me from listening. One of the key things to do was to do and not only read as many exercises as possible, including the old ones of the same professor. Then going back to reading the material once you got stuck. Most of the time I studied with a good friend who had to go to the army and did not want to lose those years. So I prepared everything during the semester and taught it to him when he took some days off before the exams. Tough times but worked well for both of us. A very good focus operator for exams was to ask the TA questions in the last exercises. The topics they answered quickly had a high chance of being relevant, because they had prepared them for the exams.
- bananaflag 11mo ago
  I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).
  - shortrounddev2 11mo ago
    Depends on your note-taking strategy. I would just transcribe what the professor was saying and ended up not paying attention. I turned my brain into a transcription machine and didn't take any time to grok anything I heard, then I had to re-read the textbook later. Nobody ever "taught" me how to study, so I was bad at it. Failed my way through high school and dropped out of college

sd9 11mo ago

I had to study for significantly longer than 6 days to barely scrape a 2:1 in my degree. Perhaps I hadn’t optimised my caffeine consumption.

lr4444lr 11mo ago

Even if you're not allowed to bring it to the exam. Writing things down helps. What you want is to cram the entire course on 1 or more pages that you can in the end tile in front of you and say with high degree of confidence "This is exactly everything I must know" Reminds me of this comedy bit in an American sitcom from about 35 years ago where the dumb kid when asked how his history test said it went okay but admitted he cheated. He explained that he tried to write down everything on his arm, there was not enough room despite multiple attempts at it. Then he realized he was starting to remember some of the content after the several rewrites, and said "so I just did it that way! I hid it all in my head and it was great! The professor didn't even know that I was cheating because there was no evidence!"

pavel_lishin 11mo ago
This sounds like something Reese from "Malcolm in the Middle" would do and say.
ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 11mo ago
I went to a concert recently and naturally they don’t let you bring alcohol in to the venue. So I very smartly decided to store the alcohol in my belly before I got there. Security had no idea how hard I bamboozled them.

Leoluc 11mo ago

" Study well in advance. Did I mention this already? Maybe I should stress it again. The brain really needs time to absorb material. Things that looked hard become easier with time. You want to alocate ~3 days for midterms, ~6 days for exams. " Are you kidding? Don't expect to pass the calculus 3 exam I took as a Physics Engineer at Politecnico di Milano with less that one month (keep in mind: bare minimum) of studying ahead of the exam (lectures not included): If you could actually get good grades with what Andrej said, I totally chose the wrong university.

tim333 11mo ago
In my physics group in Cambridge there was one student who was way better than the rest of us at physics although only normally bright at stuff outside of physics and the thing that was different about her was her dad was a physics prof and she was probably exposed to the advanced ideas a kid. I think in the same way kids pick up languages more easily than adults they may pick up other intellectual stuff.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  It matters what topics are taught in elementary school, and how they are taught. We as society need to figure out what is going to be important in 40 years (when current kids are 45-50 years old) and ensure those things are started so they slowly have time to get the concepts. I can be reasonably confident that logical thinking will be important, which you can get from Math (philosophy also has logic - is that useful too? My background is math so I don't know about that side). I'm sure other parts of math will be useful but not what. The BASIC I learned in school was worthless (it would have been useful as an introduction if my teachers didn't teach/test so many "facts" that were wrong - I was too shy to tell them that back then and now I'm mature enough to know I'd get in trouble without changing anything so there was no point)

OhioMan2943 11mo ago

I love metacognitive approaches to learning- much more interesting for people like me who get bored by the actual material pretty quickly

ninthedition 11mo ago

Article says: > TESTS: ON DAY OF > Study very intensely RIGHT before the test. > DURING THE TEST I have one other hack, really helpful and fully legal: As soon as the test starts, do a braindump onto scrap paper, especially the items just crammed beforehand. That effectively produces a cheat sheet, which is easiest to do when the information is freshest. Also, as fatigue sets in, it is harder to recall lots of facts, so doing a braindump as the very first task was a big win for me.