Name: How to study in college
ISBN: 9780395342503

What Hacker News says

JugurthaJan 2021

I'll go on a tangent and then converge and hope this will be useful.

The first book I have read after college was "How to Study in College" by Walter Pauk. After a bad experience, I wondered how I could have done it better and I wondered if there was a meta resource that would have helped me learn better.

I asked wondered if I could think about my own cognition, and if there was a discipline like that, something meta. I was amused when I finally discovered there was such a field named "metacognition". It was humbling. Duh! How could I not put it together as I literally described it with its name.

Some concepts I got into were long-term potentiation, memory, etc.

I have then read Cal Newport's book "How to be a Straight A" student. A bit late, but useful for the future.

I wanted to be able to think and solve problems better as I have noticed that even though I have the necessary skills, putting them together requires something more, a bigger picture. I found a book by Belikov called "General Methods for Sovling Physics Problems" which was really nice. Reading a formulation of what a physics problem was, what the general physics principles were, what it means to solve a problem, have helped me. One additional way to think of things is in term of feedback systems, control theory and instrumentation, which is my training in college. These help me see interactions between systems.

I then found John R. Hayes' "The Complete Problem Solver", which was a more general book. The concepts and definitions of that book are useful.

I have recently found another book "Cracked It!" which I haven't read yet, but from the authors' interviews, it does a good job of describing what I do at my job and how I help clients to increase success likelihood in projects. I'll get to reading it at some point because it seems interesting.

These are things I use to think about and solve problems. Success would be a consequence.

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JugurthaApr 2016

Oh, you're very welcome. This paper sent me down the rabbit hole: after graduating as an incompetent Electronics Engineer, I thought about the essence of competence and I stumbled upon this article. I'm always happy when I find a resource that addresses an abstract idea I'm thinking about but can't formulate for two main reasons: it always opens a door -if it has a name, it can be searched effectively- and it always amazes me how come I didn't think of it before.

For instance, after graduation, I read a book titled "How to Study in College". Why didn't I ask such an obvious question before. I learned many things, one of which is the Cornell Note-taking method.

I've always been interested in how to search for, acquire, and keep knowledge, how to apply it, how to manage it, and how to track its evolution -mental breadcrumbs, which idea lead to the other?-

So it got me interested in how memory works: how we forget, how we remember, and what to do about it. It led to Hermann Ebbinghaus and "spaced repetition". I wasn't satisfied, though, for I wanted to know the underlying brain processes. The neuroscience behind it. This led me to Hebbian Theory and the concept of Long Term Potentiation. (The Brain from Top to Bottom - http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/) which frankly blew my mind to a thousand shards: memory viewed in terms of ions. (Here's a very nice video from Carleton College "Neuroscience - Long-Term Potentiation" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vso9jgfpI_c) and here's a good presentation by Carleton's Dr. Matthew Hollahan: ("How We Can Improve Memory": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXX58QhNfjc)

In the meantime, I put a name on the discipline: Cognition/Cognitive psychology, etc..

That was good, but I still wanted to think about it in a "meta" way. Some overarching theme or discipline that englobes other things I might be missing. After some time, though, I stumbled on "metacognition", and here's where it's truly amazing how the mind works: How didn't I make the connection before between "cognition" and "meta-cognition" even though "meta" was the very word I used to think about it. It's the very thinking about thinking and was humbled because I missed such an obvious link. I have already met that word before and read about it, but it didn't "click" until that very moment.

This has also driven me to think about "learning" in a larger context: learning organization and learning countries. Why are some countries more evolved than others, etc. (Which led me to a book titled "Why Nations Fail" (again, how on Earth did I miss such an obvious question). How can we make poor countries better, or asked from another perspective: in a post-apocalyptic world where all countries are the same, what would we do to rebuild civilization? How to bootstrap civilization? Can we take those steps and apply them on difficult countries. (Bill Gates was on Jimmy Fallon and the latter asked a marvelous, in its form, question: How do you solve a poor country?).

It got me thinking about the necessity of having some conditions A and B present to have X and those conditions being absent in poor countries, you can't have X. It then got me thinking about it backwards: Given C and D, can we get Y that's either a substitute for X or something at least better than nothing. First thing that popped in my mind was the Apollo 13 carbon dioxide filter hacking. After some time, I stumbled across an article titled "The Genius of the Tinkerer" [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487039893045755037...] and it appears there is a company called "Design that Matters" that does just that. It also was interesting to see the Apollo 13 feat mentioned. Steven Johnson has also some talks on Youtube and a book titled "Where Good Ideas Come From".

Anyway, the point is you never know where a piece of content can lead to and it can be frustrating to forget some of those references or the title of an article.

Here are some useful resources, too:

[Book]: The Complete Problem Solver - John R. Hayes. [Book]: Make it Stick, The Science of Successful Learning - Peter Brown et al. [Video]: Study Less, Study Smart - Marty Lobdell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlU-zDU6aQ0).

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RickJWagnerDec 2019

The cited "How to Study in College" can be found in PDF form via Google.

I like this tip, it seems handy.

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