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Study Hacks

Demystifying Student Success

How to Ace Calculus: The Art of Doing Well in Technical CoursesNovember 14

Tangent Troubles

Calculus is easy. Or at least, it can be. The key is how you digest the material. Here’s an example: when you’re first taught derivatives in calculus class, do you remember it like this…

Or do you intuit this image…

As I will argue in this post, for any technical course — be it calculus, physics, or microeconomics — the key between an ‘A’ and a struggle comes down to this distinction. Below I’ll explain exactly what I mean and reveal how top technical students use this realization to consistently ace their classes.

How Every Technical Class is Taught

Technical classes have a simple structure. In each lecture, the professor presents a series of concepts. Depending on the difficulty of the material, she may cover anywhere from one to more than a dozen. For each concept, the professor will derive the result from concepts you already know and/or provide an example of the concept in practice.

That’s it.

This simplicity is good. It will make it easier for us to develop a strategy to conquer the material…

The Magic of Insight

What do you do with the concepts being spewed by the professor? Most students dutifully copy them down along wi

Plan.txt : The Most Effective Productivity Tool That You’ve Never Heard OfNovember 11

The Two Faces of Productivity

Productivity can be divided into two main concerns. The first is capturing and organizing all of the “stuff” you have to do.

This is the fun part.

This is where you buy fancy notebooks and configure Remember the Milk to auto-sync with your iPhone. It keeps productivity blogs in business and makes David Allen rich.

The second concern is actually doing the stuff that you need to do.

This is much less fun.

This post is about this second concern. I don’t claim to have a universal answer. But there is a simple technique that I’ve been using since last January, and that has significantly increased my churn rate. This technique centers on a small, innocuous text file sitting on my computer desktop — a file named plan.txt…

plan.txt

Once a week, usually on Mondays, I open a small text file named plan.txt and jot down my action plan for the week.

There are no hard rules for this plan. Some weeks it’s a few sentences. Usually, it’s a few paragraphs. Sometimes it spans multiple pages.

I tend to break down what I want to get done into the major area of my life (grad studen

Does Being Exceptional Require an Exceptional Amount of Work?November 7

The Obama Method

In response to my recent article on Misery Poker, a reader commented:

I wonder about the really exceptional people. Does Barack Obama “build a realistic schedule”? … maybe extraordinary stress IS required to accomplish extraordinary feats

Another reader added:

I think extraordinary sacrifices are required for great accomplishments.

This is a fascinating argument. Study Hacks, as you know, is driven by the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, which claims that it’s possible to be both relaxed and impressive. But these commenters are pushing back on this world view. It’s one to thing, they note, to have a successful college career that is also relaxed, but is it possible to have an exceptional career without overwhelming amounts of work?

In this post I claim it is possible. And I’ll explain exactly how…

Barriers and Myths

Let’s start with the myth that drives most peoples’ thinking about what it takes to be exceptional:

The Exceptional Effort Myth: Excepti

Do You Play Misery Poker or Quack?November 5

College Woes

A Swarthmore student recently clued me into an interesting fact about life at this competitive school:

The whole predominant atmosphere here is stress, stress, and more stress. We even have a term called misery poker.

Naturally, I asked her for an explanation. She responded with the following sample dialog:

“I have two midterms, a 10 page paper, and I’m headed to a conference next weekend,” says the stressed student

“Oh yeah?,” replies his bleary-eyed friend. “I’ll raise you all that, and add a lab report”

The winner is the student whose life sucks the most.

Leena Weighs In

This sounded familar. Among MIT undergraduates, misery poker seems to be the standard method for communicating.

But here’s my question: why?

Why do students — especially those at elite institutions — gravitate toward self-pity and mild masochism? Is it a self-defense mechanism? Is it a way of bonding?

Curious, I asked our friend Leena — no stranger to misery poker — for her thoughts.

“I’ve discovered that at challenging schools, the culture goes one of two ways,” she replied.

“Some stude

Monday Master Class: How to Keep Life Interesting with a Saturday Morning ProjectOctober 27

A Dash of Spice

Have you finished your mid-semester dash? If not, make a plan to do it! I’m already hearing reports from readers of huge post-dash stress reductions.

Once you’ve completed this purge, return to this post. Below, I will teach you how to keep your newly stripped down student life from becoming too boring.

The Grand Project

Readers of How to Win at College know that I’m a big fan of what I like to call: “Grand Projects.” I introduced the idea on the blog early last winter, but haven’t given it much attention since then.

Let’s change that.

Here’s the basic definition:

A Grand Project is any project that when explained to someone for the first time is likely to elicit a response of “wow!’

The purpose of a grand project is two-fold:

First, it injects excitement and possibility into your student life. As I sa