Something I have a lot of experience with is studying. Specifically, studying courses that are problem heavy. Their counterpart, courses that are memorization heavy, are not really applicable to this prose. Apart from me not having much experience with them, there happens to be more variety in the methods to determine success in these courses. As you will shortly see, with problem heavy courses - they are not.

As a result of what I just described, much of the advice I am about to provide happens to apply to engineering students. A big reason for this is because in engineering your biggest problem tends to be the quantity of work, not really the difficulty of said work. To this end, you should try to optimize to finish work in the shortest amount of time.

This seems obvious, and it sort of is - but what isn’t as obvious to people is that you should absolutely optimize for this at the expense of not gaining a “complete” understanding of a given topic.

University would have you think this is a terrible way to operate, and I will explain succinctly why it’s not as bad as it sounds. First, you need to develop a certain amount of “technical fluency” [1] before it becomes valuable (or even worth) gaining a deeper understanding of topics. It’s really hard to delve deep into any type of engineering concepts if you can’t apply a Laplace transform, for instance - or are not well-versed with integration. So to that end, your main focus in early courses in engineering should really be getting as fluent and proficient at the raw techniques that are being thought - the theory is an add-on.

I want to point out that a lot of this is really a person to person thing. Broadly speaking, I’ve met more people who fall into this camp, but it is absolutely the case some will prefer more theory to enhance learning.

It’s worth noting that the reason I brought up this deep exploration instance isn’t because students have an inclination always want to dig deeper. Rather, professors impose a bulk load of theory upon students in what are otherwise very straightforward concepts. Here is an example. In Calculus II, you learn how to compute the area of a solid around an axis of rotation. [2] Most professors would spend a lot of time attempting to draw out and visualize this very complex topic. This is their job, because they can’t really just prescribe the formula to you without any background. But for you, the student, you stand to gain very little from understanding this theory and background. In-fact, it may lead to more confusion since it’s a very thing to wrap your head around.

That is one reason you shouldn’t worry too much about the deep understanding. The second reason is mostly an extension of the first. If you start thinking too much about the applications and background early in your degree - you are likely to make shortsighted assumptions on your interests. It would be bizzare to take a circuits course and decide you wouldn’t want to do PCB’s, or control systems or something else - even though they are briefly touched upon. This is bizzare because there is obviously further courses you have to take to cast judgement like this. And even if there isn’t, the longer you study the more broadly you become knowledgeable, leading to new discoveries in personal interests. The opposite of this situation is true as well. You shouldn’t take a course, and preemptively decide you like a certain application of it. The reason for this is the same again, there is obviously further learning to do and you haven’t been exposed to the core learnings yet. Incidentally, this is a much less common situation than the first. It’s far more common you self-disqualify yourself early on then it is you perceive yourself to be good at something too early.

So it’s probably clear now that the techniques are more important than the understanding. But how do you get good at the techniques?

To this, is a very simple answer that is likely to raise your GPA significantly. Just use the textbook. That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less. When I tell people this, they normally laugh this off and think it’s a joke. It’s very hard to look at that 900 page textbook [3] and view it in any other light other than an inconvenience to your study habits.

To understand why studying from a textbook is a good idea, it’s prudent to figure out what we are trying to avoid when studying.

A first thing we want to avoid is studying the wrong things. This is very self explanatory, but it’s all to common to see people studying random topics mentioned in the lecture slides. In a perfect world, whatever is taught in class is on the exams. This tends to not be the case, and while the reason why is not important, how to fix such an issue is. What’s important to realize is that all courses at the university level normally have a textbook associated with them. This is because it’s impossible to cover all the content in class. So your best metric for preparing the correct topics is the textbook - since the course is modelled of it.

A second thing we want to avoid, which is crucial, is spending time deciding how to study. In any task, friction reduces the chance of you completing it. It would be silly to say you want to cook at home, but not have any ingredients. What’s more? It would be just as silly to want to cook at home, but not know where any of your ingredients are. If you want to study - you should know where to go. The problem with not using a textbook is you waste valuable time searching for resources. Going to YouTube, digging through class notes, KhanAcademy and other resources. This is incredibly ineffective, not to mention the likelihood you’ll get distracted while browsing the web for answers. The textbook, on the other hand - gets you basically all the resources in one spot. No blundering with tons of websites - a much simpler solution.

The third and final thing we want to avoid is not having enough (or good enough) problems to study. Hopefully you run into this problem often, because it not only means that you are trying - but it also means you are on the right track when it comes to study strategies. This is a common problem to run into if you aren’t using a textbook. Most online websites and YouTube videos have the tendency oversimplify problems and only go over the easiest ones. They have to do this, because covering edge cases would not really work in the timeframe of 20-30 minutes. It’s also the case they can only have so many problems to go through. Textbooks suffer from neither of these issues. They have all the problems you could ask for (plus more) and have a great variety. They can afford to talk about all the edge cases (which happen to be the exam problems, unfortunately) for the sole reason there’s no real limit on the page count.

Those are some reasons textbooks are good - now here are some caveats to what I talked about above.

The first caveat I have to mention is that only a select few textbooks in any one domain will tick all three of these boxes. They are plenty of bad textbooks out there, and so the advice here is to not always use the textbook prescribed by your teacher. Unless you are at a very high level, most textbooks cover exactly the same content. For example, for Calculus - have your pick between Thomas or Stewart - they cover the same stuff.

The second caveat is a sort of elephant in the room. The use of AI would seem to fill all the gaps presented by conventional study methods and avoid the problems that come with textbooks. Although this may be true, my argument against using AI for studying extends far beyond this article. The surmise of it would be that AI does not help you master the techniques. There is no substitute for doing the problems. And doing the problems is the only effective way, most of the time, to do well.

I would try at this point to TL;DR this article but it seems pretty hard to do it. Let’s summarize with three key points instead.

1: If you are early in undergrad, focus on techniques - less on theory.

2: Use some textbook, whenever you can.

3: Almost all courses in engineering reward those who do a lot, and high variety of, practice problems.

Basically: read the textbook and do problems, everything else is (almost always) just noise.

Notes