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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: 0.238s | source
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stared ◴[19 Oct 25 18:50 UTC] No.45636831[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>45645215 #
1. ProllyInfamous ◴[20 Oct 25 15:44 UTC] No.45645215[source]▶
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."