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

(cs.stanford.edu)
674 points peterkshultz | 1 comments | 19 Oct 25 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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ropable ◴[20 Oct 25 03:59 UTC] No.45640105[source]▶
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.
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KronisLV ◴[20 Oct 25 08:25 UTC] No.45641263[source]▶
> 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.

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1. CaptainOfCoit ◴[20 Oct 25 10:56 UTC] No.45642479[source]▶
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.