Studying At College

Introduction

This blog has spent a significant amount of time providing insight into AP Computer Science. The next step ultimately will be going to College. AP courses offer a taste of college material but that material is spread over the course of a school year. In college that same material is covered in about 15 weeks. That really is the difference and it's a huge difference. There is very little room for an error. There will be fewer tests each covering more material. Since many who come to this site are just starting out in the field of Computer Science I thought I would collect some web sites here that can provide you some help on studying.

My own experience, way back when, was a hodge podge of mistakes and mishaps. I only wish the world wide web was around when I was going to college. If nothing else than to find out what help was available at my school for subjects I was having trouble with. Instead I would ask around or ask someone who was doing well in the course but in the end they had limited time to help. My college years were spent muddling through as best I could, studying long hours without seeing much success on these tough courses. In my day jobs were plentiful and GPA was important but it wasn't everything. Once you graduated and gained real life experience you could shift jobs, change direction without much difficulty.

Those days are gone. Jobs are a little more difficult to come by. US corporations keep lobbying for increases in the H1B visa program so they can bring in foreign STEM workers cheap. Why should I hire a B student from any State University when I can grab an A student from India Institute of Technology? In a better day US companies were restricted from doing things like that. Now, not so much. That doesn't mean you can't find a job it just means that now more than ever your GPA right out of college is your ticket to getting your foot in the door of corporate America.

Do what you love and never work a day in your life.

There is truth to this old saying. You have to be realistic of course. No one is going to pay you to eat and drink beer all day. But you can get paid for a variety of fun jobs. If you like programming computers and designing software there are jobs available that pay pretty well. If you like training dogs there are ways to make money doing this. So your first step when you go to college is to figure out what Major you are going to love.

I didn't do that. I decided that Computer Science was too easy and that I needed to understand how the electronics worked behind the computer. So I suffered through an Electrical Engineering degree, when I could have breezed through a Computer Science degree. In the end it worked out OK but it took me 4 years after college to finally land a software job. In the end the hardware and software experience would help me start up a company so I can't complain. But I could have taken Computer Science as my major and taken the fun courses in Electrical Engineering as part of my electives and looked a heck of a lot better on paper.

I bore you with this only because if you are a college student who is struggling with their course load, I know the feeling, I've been there. I've made every mistake in the book. I've told myself every excuse there was on how it wasn't my fault. The reality was two fold: First I was in the wrong major and second I had no idea how much time I was supposed to be spending on studying. From my high school experience I needed a couple of hours of studying the night before a test. In college that is not going to cut it unless your a super genius and if you are a super genius thank you for reading my blog! But if you're a mere mortal like me it would be nice to know the minimum amount of time you should be working.

Getting into "The Flow"

You may have experienced what people call "The Flow" when working on a computer project. It's that point in time where the work ahead is clear in your mind and you are just spitting out lines of a program quickly and easily. When you come out you realize you have just been super productive have gotten 80 to 90% of the work done and you're wondering: why couldn't that have happened sooner? I would have been completely finished by now. You may have experienced "The Flow" when reading a good book. You get to a particular section where the story sort of tells itself and you don't really notice the time passing. You become "absorbed" in the book.

The key is to get into "The Flow" for whatever you happen to be studying. This can be quite difficult for a required course you don't like very much and it can be simple for a course you love. The point is you need to train yourself to get into "The Flow" quickly whenever you need to whether you like the material or not. That is easier said than done and I don't know of a method to guarantee this happens quickly. My method is to observe yourself. How long do you have to sit there and what things do you do to get yourself into "The Flow"?

Start creating a routine (this is where you start to become OCD and superstitious) that you do before you begin to study. If you have to pace back and forth 5 times after you set up your study material on the desk, so be it. If you need a sip of coffee, red bull or diet coke make sure you have it handy. If you need to wash your hands 5 times OK whatever, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that you develop a routine that you do every time you start to study. The idea is to condition the mind over time that this routine will lead to "The Flow" and sooner or later your mind will start to cooperate.

For me, I found that I basically needed 5 hours to study 3 (meaning over the 5 hours I sat down to study only 3 hours of "good" study happened). Sometimes 5 hours to get 2 hours of good study. This becomes the crux of the matter, I alluded to the minimum amount of time you needed to study for each course in the previous section. We will get to that number shortly but that number represents good study time. By observing yourself and objectively assessing your use of study time, you should be able to set up a schedule for yourself and map out your entire week. Guess what. If you need 5 hours to study 3 there isn't going to be much time left for extracirricular activities.

The Formula credit hours to study hours

The University of Michigan at Flint study website (https://www.umflint.edu/advising/surviving_college) says you need:

• 2 hours of study for every 1 credit hour of class
• So a 12 credit hour semester = 24 hours of extra study per week.

Based on that, between classes and studying you will chew up 36 hours per week. So even a light semester schedule is equivalent to a full time job in terms of hours spent. If you're like me and you need 4 - 5 hours to get 2 hours of good study you are looking at about 60 hours per week. That's the equivalent of full time job and a part time job at night. If you want weekends off you will need to start work at 8am and finish by 5pm Monday - Friday (includes 1 hour lunch) if your an efficient studier. To get to 60 and have weekends off 8am - 10pm with an hour for lunch and an hour for dinner included. If you want to join a club and need your evenings free, you need to study more efficiently (good luck with that because if your still reading then your doomed like me ot be an inefficient studier, not because you're reading slowly but because your still looking for advice) or you will need to use your weekend time to make up the difference.

This may seem absurd to you but I assure you that in the real world of the salaried employee there are many times where you are called on to work 60 - 80 hours per week. That's the point of college, right? To prepare you for what you might have to do in the real world? I hope you take my advice because I assure you I have tried everything to avoid having to aquiesce to this reality and in the end I found out that there is no way around hard work. Trust me on this I spent a lot of time in my life trying to make up for this fact. After college if I wasn't studying at night to perform better at my job I was taking courses so I could get the job I really wanted. So the hard work eventually gets put in, it's all a matter of timing. It also shows that what employers are really buying when they hire a college graduate is a person who has learned how to study. It provides a level of confidence that when new stuff crops up on the job the employee will be able to work through it and figure out a way to accoplish it. In a technical field most of your knowledge will be obsolete in 5 years anyway, so the reality is your entire value you bring to the table as a college graduate is your ability to study.

Links to other study sites

• http://www.howtostudy.com
• http://www.sas.calpoly.edu/asc/ssl.html
• http://www.dartmouth.edu/~acskills/handouts.html (even people at ivy league schools need study help)
• https://teachingcenter.ufl.edu/study-skills/ (they have some short videos on various study methods)

I would encourage you to do your own web search on the topic of study skills or study in college on a frequent basis. You may discover something that is very helpful to your own personality. Remember you must take this information and personalize it for yourself. Somethings that work for other people may not work for you. But you need to keep searching for the answers.

Study block or the little voice that won't

In any endeavor there is a part of your mind that tells you: you can't do it. this is a waste of time. Your a fool for trying. This will never work. I noticed it first when I played keeper in Soccer. It was fun to dive at first but after a few dives I noticed the thought process increased (ie. that little voice got louder). Sometimes your internal dialog is helpful, but a lot of times it's your own worst enemy. Somewhere during a game the thoughts would be you're never going to stop this guy's shots why even bother to dive? or He's in too close the ball will be well past you even if you try to dive. At this point I would dive no matter what. Even if my reaction time was off and I'm diving well after the shot. The point was to show that part of my mind we are diving anyway there is no way to avoid the pain so from now on let's get with the program and see if we can stop these shots.

That same thought process happens when you try to study. It starts as: "lets play a video game first". "Check what's on TV we can study later". "It's such a long walk to the library why bother just read a little bit hear in your room". But if you choose to entertain the thought process it devolves into. "You're going to fail anyway". "2 hours is enough you know all you can get is a C". "You're just not good at this course so why bother with it". This is all part of what I call study block. It's like writer's block but it encompasses the whole study process not just the writing part.

The way out of the thought process is rituals. By going through rituals you are telling your inner voice I'm not listening. See I'm getting ready to study and there's nothing you can do about it. Over time you train yourself to get into a study mode. I would make the following suggestions if you're having trouble studying:

• Find a study area that is not part of your living quarters, your home should be the reward and sanctuary for good studying, or used on special occasions.
• If possible find a place where you have access to a white board or chalk board
• Try to get a study room if they are available rather than a carol where you have a table to spread out on
• If you must listen to music choose instrumentals rather than anything with singing. Experiment with your musical selections and see if any produce better studying.
• If you find that you keep reading the same passage over and over read aloud for a while. Reading aloud forces you to engage more of your brain. It slows you down a little because you can read faster when you read silently, but if it's the only way to push through the material so be it.
• Make a cheat sheet. Not to cheat mind you, but hypothetically if you were to cheat what could you put down on an 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper that would guarantee you a good grade? This is really a good method of condensing your notes but, somehow, because you call it a cheat sheet, the "little voice" gets intriuged and starts to help you: "Don't for get to put down stuff for this section"

More on flow

There's a lot on the internet about flow. It's a concept that's been around a while and everyone rediscovers it from time to time. Back in the late 80's early 90's I remember an article that talked about helping programmers achieve flow. The single most important thing they found was to provide them an office with a door. Literally to shut out distractions.

In Software Development there are always discussions about "The Flow". I believe that the reason so many programmers work into the wee hours of the morning has to do with maintaining the flow state. There are fewer distractions at night. You are tired which I believe stops the internal chatter that can get in the way of achieving the flow state. There is also the reward of going to bed when you're finished. I can't tell you how many times I've told myself, at 1 in the morning, let me finish up the code for this last method and make sure it compiles and I'll call it a night and finally crawl into bed around 3.

Just to show you I'm not making this stuff up check out the following short article:

• Programmers and "Flow" http://www.devx.com/DevX/Article/11659

One thing you will see mentioned about flow, in some articles,is to do something that you love. That's something that College Students may not have the luxury of doing. You are not going to love every course you take. But you still need to try to get into flow if you are going to study well. The above article does a good job of describing some of the symptoms of flow. But you don't really know your in it until your out of it. Then you realize that wow I just got alot done or you find that 2 hours have gone by and you hardly noticed. This state is highly personalized as well. Don't feel too bad if you don't have the highly romanticized experiences described on the web. In the end you're just looking for some highly productive time where things seemed to finally click. In the end "The Flow" is just some good efficient study time, if you get anymore emotional benefits from it it's just icing on the cake.

Author: Nasty Old Dog

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