Keep on Studying

I never studied until I got to college. I always got by just fine by paying attention in class and doing my homework. I didn't start taking notes in earnest until college. But even in college, I didn't need to study much. It wasn't until graduate school that things got too hard for me to just absorb and I actually started studying on a regular basis.

As a consequence, I had no study skills. Notecards? The first time I ever made them, I was a sophomore taking organic chemistry. Even then, my "studying" consisted of making the notecards, and maybe going through them a couple of times in the days leading up to the exams. Reading the textbook? I never really tried that until my senior year of college. Of course I would read the books in my literature courses, and my social science textbooks, but I never read a science textbook until I took numerical linear algebra my final year of college. It helped, believe it or not! There was actually information in that book, explained in a slightly different manner than my professor had explained it in class, and that made a difference in my learning. But still, I didn't really study; I just read it once and that was enough to get an A in the class.

In graduate school, I actually had to do more than just pay attention and take notes in class, do the homework, and read the textbook once. I had to read the textbook and take notes. I had no idea how to take notes! So I would copy word-for-word from the textbook at times. In particular, I remember I had a really tough time in my operating systems class. Looking back, I realize that the course was little more than a bunch of definitions and new vocabulary words. If I had only had the study skills, I could have done a lot better in that class.

In my more math-oriented classes, I would work out the examples in a notebook, going through the steps they skipped in the book. This was actually good training for reading math papers.

The summer of my first year of graduate school, I began to study for the qualifying exam. This was a 90-minute oral exam, covering a broad syllabus of numerical analysis. There was a textbook that was a perfect study guide for the exam, so I worked with two other students who were also scheduled to take the qual that fall, and we went through the entire book, one chapter per week. I'm so glad that I had others to study with, because I suspect that I would have lacked the self-discipline to work through the book. We did all the exercises at the end of each chapter, and we gave each other mock quals. My advisor also gave us mock quals.

I had never studied so hard in my life! But by the end I was getting pretty burned out. So I was really devastated when I failed the exam. And I was angry, really really angry! Something extremely unfair had happened during my exam: one of the professors behaved inappropriately, but despite this fact, they counted the exam against me. I was terrified that this exam showed that even with all that studying, I was too stupid to continue in the graduate program. But I retook the exam in the spring, and I passed, despite my bad attitude. I was very hostile during the second exam. Later on, I became on more friendly terms with one of my examiners, and I asked him if they'd passed me just because they thought I might go ballistic otherwise. He laughed and agreed that I had been hostile, but reassured me that I had passed on my own merits.

After all my exams and coursework was over, I thought that surely this would be the end of studying. Alas, it was not. I had to read and understand the scientific literature in my field, and that required studying papers. It is hard to read papers, because they are terse and boring, and my attention span is short. It takes several readings to understand even the simplest paper. First I skim the paper through, to get a feel for the big idea of the paper and the important conclusions. Then, before my hand started causing me so much trouble, I would take a lot of notes and work out all the equations on the second pass. Even now, I splurge and work out all the equations by hand, but I do most of the note-taking on the computer. Unfortunately there's no easy way to write equations on a computer, so I get bogged down in the notation if I try to do it on the computer. Then I'll read it a third time through just to make sure that I didn't miss anything.

And I have to study a lot anytime I learn something new. For my job, I had to learn C++ templates, something I didn't really know that much about. So I found some good tutorials on the internet, and worked through them.

Back when I was in high school and early in my college career, there wasn't really very much on the internet. Today, however, you can find almost everything you would ever need to know on a computer. So another study skill I've had to develop is the web search. I use Google to find a lot of solutions to problems that I encounter while programming: strange messages from the compiler, object-oriented programming concepts that I don't understand, etc. I also use CiteSeer to look for math and computer science papers on topics related to my research, such as optimization, multiwavelets and load balancing.

Even though I'm out of school, and have been for nearly two years, I still use study skills almost every day. I guess that learning new things is why this job remains interesting. Keep on studying!