Summary: I have updated on being more conscientious than I thought.
Since most of the advice on 80.000 hours is aimed at high performing college students, I find it difficult how much this advice should apply to myself, who just graduated from high school. Previously I had thought of myself as talented in math (I was the best in my class with 40 students, since first grade), but mid- to below average in conscientiousness. I also feel slightly ashamed of my (hand-)writing: most of my teachers commented that my texts were too short and my writing is not exactly pretty. I was diagnosed with ADHD with eleven and even with medication, my working memory is pretty bad. Even though I have started to develop strategies to cope with my disabilities, I wasn’t sure how I was doing compared to those classmates that performed better in writing. So I just assumed that they must be way more productive. Recently I thought it would be interesting to try to predict my final grades by predicting the grades for every subject using Guesstimate (Unfortunately I later put in the grades I got in the end without saving my initial model. If someone is interested I can try to recreate it). This proved to be more useful then I thought: It was a major update for me being more productive and conscientious compared to the rest of my class.
Together with another student, I got the highest grades in German (my native tongue) in my final exam (13 out of 15 points), because I practiced writing (Exams).
I think I would not have realized that I had false assumptions about my performance if I had not seen the difference (There were 3-4 additional students in my class who I thought would be better than me in the final exam) between my prediction and the outcome.
It is not like I was bad before in German, but I attributed a lot of the credit to my teacher liking me. Since a second teacher graded my final exam, this effect shouldn’t be as great.
even with medication, my working memory is pretty bad
To say the obvious: make notes about what you learn. (I am not recommending any specific note-taking method here, only the general advice that a mediocre system you actually start using today is better than a hypothetically perfect system you only dream about.) It really sucks to spend a lot of time and work learning something, then not using it for a few years, then finding out you actually forgot everything.
This usually doesn’t happen at high school, because the elementary and high school education is designed as a spiral (you learn something, then four years later you learn the more advanced version of the thing). But at university: you may learn a thing once, and maybe never again.
I was the best in my class with 40 students
How much this means, you will only find out later, because it depends a lot on your specific school and classmates. I mean, it definitely means that you are good… but is it 1:100 good or 1:1000000 good? At high school both are impressive, but in later life you are going to compete against people who often also were the best in their classes.
I mean, it definitely means that you are good… but is it 1:100 good or 1:1000000 good? At high school both are impressive, but in later life you are going to compete against people who often also were the best in their classes.
Update after a year:
I am currently studying CS and I feel like I got kind of spoiled by reading “How to be a straight A student” which was mostly aimed at us-college students, and it was kind of hard to sort out which kinds of advice would apply in Germany and made the whole thing seem easier than it actually is. I am doing ok, but my grades aren’t great (my best guess is that in pure grit+IQ I’m somewhere in the upper 40%). In the end, I decided that the value of this information wasn’t so great after all, and now I am focusing more on how to actually gain career capital and getting better at prioritizing on a day-to-day basis.
Summary: I have updated on being more conscientious than I thought.
Since most of the advice on 80.000 hours is aimed at high performing college students, I find it difficult how much this advice should apply to myself, who just graduated from high school. Previously I had thought of myself as talented in math (I was the best in my class with 40 students, since first grade), but mid- to below average in conscientiousness. I also feel slightly ashamed of my (hand-)writing: most of my teachers commented that my texts were too short and my writing is not exactly pretty. I was diagnosed with ADHD with eleven and even with medication, my working memory is pretty bad. Even though I have started to develop strategies to cope with my disabilities, I wasn’t sure how I was doing compared to those classmates that performed better in writing. So I just assumed that they must be way more productive. Recently I thought it would be interesting to try to predict my final grades by predicting the grades for every subject using Guesstimate (Unfortunately I later put in the grades I got in the end without saving my initial model. If someone is interested I can try to recreate it). This proved to be more useful then I thought: It was a major update for me being more productive and conscientious compared to the rest of my class.
Together with another student, I got the highest grades in German (my native tongue) in my final exam (13 out of 15 points), because I practiced writing (Exams).
I think I would not have realized that I had false assumptions about my performance if I had not seen the difference (There were 3-4 additional students in my class who I thought would be better than me in the final exam) between my prediction and the outcome.
It is not like I was bad before in German, but I attributed a lot of the credit to my teacher liking me. Since a second teacher graded my final exam, this effect shouldn’t be as great.
To say the obvious: make notes about what you learn. (I am not recommending any specific note-taking method here, only the general advice that a mediocre system you actually start using today is better than a hypothetically perfect system you only dream about.) It really sucks to spend a lot of time and work learning something, then not using it for a few years, then finding out you actually forgot everything.
This usually doesn’t happen at high school, because the elementary and high school education is designed as a spiral (you learn something, then four years later you learn the more advanced version of the thing). But at university: you may learn a thing once, and maybe never again.
How much this means, you will only find out later, because it depends a lot on your specific school and classmates. I mean, it definitely means that you are good… but is it 1:100 good or 1:1000000 good? At high school both are impressive, but in later life you are going to compete against people who often also were the best in their classes.
Update after a year: I am currently studying CS and I feel like I got kind of spoiled by reading “How to be a straight A student” which was mostly aimed at us-college students, and it was kind of hard to sort out which kinds of advice would apply in Germany and made the whole thing seem easier than it actually is. I am doing ok, but my grades aren’t great (my best guess is that in pure grit+IQ I’m somewhere in the upper 40%). In the end, I decided that the value of this information wasn’t so great after all, and now I am focusing more on how to actually gain career capital and getting better at prioritizing on a day-to-day basis.