[kylepdm]

A lot of this is absolutely great advice. I struggled a lot in my first couple years of university having to get adjusted to a much more difficult learning environment that expects much more of you than what HS required.

The biggest change for me was when I started to take notes by hand, and re-take them, as a form of studying. Also focusing on understanding the fundamentals of a class vs trying to ace practice material. I went from a mid 70s GPA to 90s.

But I think a lot of where students struggle is just the acquired discipline necessary to succeed. Studying isn't very fun or enjoyable - at most it can be nice to focus and have goals, but most people have tons of anxiety leading into it and procrastinate a bunch. At the end of the day, there aren't any study hacks or anything, it's just that you have to put the time into it, and you have to essentially "learn how to learn".

This was very apparent in my upper year CS classes where I saw a lot of students struggle to do well in exams for what wasn't terribly difficult material. I realized a lot of students just weren't willing to sit down and study the necessary amount of time. I thank my time in microbiology courses where I had to learn to study every night to memorize tons of different concepts and be able to apply them all to each other. I think students in life sciences tend to know how to study more simply because their courses have a lot more concepts and fundamentals than most CS courses.

If you are in college/university and reading this you have to realize you just have to put the time in. That amount of time differs from person to person. I did really well in my CS program, but I put tons of time into it.

[ghostbrainalpha]

There is more to it than just time..

As a History major all I ever needed to do was read all the material. I dedicated enough time to do that and was fine in all my history classes. 90% reading 10% note review.

For CS and Biology, I read the material but that didn't mean I understood it well enough to map it onto the material that came afterward. I never really knew when I understood something well enough, or how to know be confident I knew something well enough to move forward.

Programming eventually came to me through websites like CodeWars, where I could repeat the easy concepts Over and Over again as simple games. After months of playing around, I understood them in a more subconscious way. Although I still don't know how to make this progress efficiently.