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

(cs.stanford.edu)
674 points peterkshultz | 2 comments | 19 Oct 25 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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brosco ◴[19 Oct 25 17:41 UTC] No.45636152[source]▶
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.

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chongli ◴[19 Oct 25 19:50 UTC] No.45637344[source]▶
This is fun to do during lectures but in my experience only about 5-10% of my learning happened in math class. The other 90% happened at home as I worked through the problem sets.

Essentially the lectures served as an inefficient way of delivering me a set of notes which I’d then reference during homework sessions. I could often predict what was coming next in the lecture but the really hard parts were the key parts in some technical lemmas that were necessary to complete the theorem. Learning how to figure out a key step like that had to come completely on my own (with no spoilers).

In a lot of ways, math lectures really started to turn into an experience similar to watching a Let’s Play of a favourite video game. Watching those can tell you exactly what you need to do to get past the part where you’re stuck but they don’t in general make you better at video games. For that you need to actually play them yourself.

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1. hirvi74 ◴[19 Oct 25 20:23 UTC] No.45637619[source]▶
I had a math professor in college that would often say to our class, "You cannot be like Michael Jordan by just watching Michael Jordan. If you want to be better at basketball, you have to practice. Math is no different." No matter how you spin it, he was correct -- unless you are like Ramanujan and a Hindu god just reveals a solution to you.

Honestly though, I believe I learn better in a similar manner to what you described. I would rather just read the textbook and learn on my own. I find that to be a far more efficient learning style for me. However, I typically always went to class for a handful of reasons:

1. To signal that I cared about the subject to the professor (whether I honestly cared or not). Though I had some classes that actually penalized a lack of attendance.

2. There is comradery in group struggle. It was nice way to meet other students that had a common goal. I made many friends during my time. Some of which I still keep in touch with a decade later. In fact, I met my SO in one of my classes -- all because we studied together.

3. The main reason being, I paid for the class, and I wanted to get my money's worth out of it. While passing the course and learning the material was the goal. I'd hate knowing I just paid to teach myself everything. I could have done that for free, so I wanted something more out of the deal.

One of thing I should add is that I am poorly disciplined and have poor executive functioning, so I probably picked up more in class that I would admit -- I didn't have a control to compare against. Still to this date, I rely heavily on solutions to the problems. Not in a way that allows me to cheat, but I would likely be unable to be certain I was teaching myself correctly if I didn't have the answers or know of a method to verify my work. I am confident that I cannot be confident in my answers to nearly anything. I am prone to too many mistakes.

If one goes far enough in math, one will encounter solutions where there are not clear answers and one must use all of their knowledge and abilities to support their answers. And that my YN friends, is why I am not a mathematician despite my love for the subject.

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2. foobarian ◴[20 Oct 25 00:49 UTC] No.45639302[source]▶
- I find that writing notes in class helped me learn just through the physical action of my hands. (I think there is some formal study of this as a phenomenon). I am poorly disciplined so at least getting that hour or so of writing notes is probably more than I would have managed alone.

- In class, sometimes the lecturer provides helpful intuition for something through informal speech or even intonation. For example I struggled with the concept of ergodicity from a textbook until I saw someone explain it to me like I'm 5. I find that often, textbooks are like man pages, in that they are almost afraid to provide informal/intuitive writing for fear of appearing unserious.

p.s. if ChatGPT existed 30 years ago I would have managed to learn so much more instead of spinning wheels on dry writing. ChatGPT is really good at being a "personalized manpage explainer"