I was in grad school when I realized I didn’t know how to learn. I skated in high school and college, though looking back, some of those higher level classes in college should have been a sign that there was a problem, but I pulled it off with reasonably good grades.
It was a year or so into grad school before I realized I needed to learn this stuff without relying on the professor. I graduated, but not by much.
I must have been doing something right, because a friend would never take any notes in class, borrow mine, then do better on the tests. But I might have been better served to not take notes and study the books more.
Part of it was simply the realization that we were expected to figure it out or ask for help. That’s true in college, too, but even more so in grad school. How are the profs going to know there’s a problem if we don’t say anything? And they did want to help, but again it was rare for me to go to the profs in college.
I should have also saidb(honestly I forgot) that my program instituted a new curriculum the year I started, and many of us were struggling with it. The previous setup had some intermediate courses that helped ease the transition, but the new one dove in deeper to start. They changed it again after we graduated, because so many of us ended at the masters instead of continuing on to a PhD. So that was certainly a factor, too, but it also highlighted my own weakness.
I had a similar problem - the only college courses I didn’t ace were ones I didn’t show up to - and dropped out of grad skool after it kicked my ass for a year.
I was in grad school when I realized I didn’t know how to learn. I skated in high school and college, though looking back, some of those higher level classes in college should have been a sign that there was a problem, but I pulled it off with reasonably good grades.
It was a year or so into grad school before I realized I needed to learn this stuff without relying on the professor. I graduated, but not by much.
Any good references? I learn by doing, but that doesn’t work well with purely theoretical stuff.
No, not really.
I must have been doing something right, because a friend would never take any notes in class, borrow mine, then do better on the tests. But I might have been better served to not take notes and study the books more.
Part of it was simply the realization that we were expected to figure it out or ask for help. That’s true in college, too, but even more so in grad school. How are the profs going to know there’s a problem if we don’t say anything? And they did want to help, but again it was rare for me to go to the profs in college.
I should have also saidb(honestly I forgot) that my program instituted a new curriculum the year I started, and many of us were struggling with it. The previous setup had some intermediate courses that helped ease the transition, but the new one dove in deeper to start. They changed it again after we graduated, because so many of us ended at the masters instead of continuing on to a PhD. So that was certainly a factor, too, but it also highlighted my own weakness.
I had a similar problem - the only college courses I didn’t ace were ones I didn’t show up to - and dropped out of grad skool after it kicked my ass for a year.