What hobbies do you have? What extracurriculars are you engaged in? Competitive math, physics, science olympiad, and similar events are a good way to learn all sorts of stuff. Pursuing a hobby that involves some engineering can be a great way to learn math and physics. Electronics, robotics, rocketry, and the like might be fruitful areas to explore, but can all rapidly exceed your budget.
Where do you live? Is there a local hackerspace / makerspace you could get to? I suspect broadening your social horizons may be an excellent bet. These may also be able to provide tools, workspace, and collaborators that might make some of the above hobbies more approachable on your budget.
I highly recommend learning to program if you haven’t already. The logical structure will help train your thinking in all kinds of useful ways. If you already know some programming, get better at it. Contribute a patch to some open source project you use.
How best to learn math depends on what kind of math and what your goals are. I think the best way to learn calculus is through learning physics. Learning number theory is fun, links reasonably well with programming, and is less likely to make your classes even more boring as you simply get further ahead in the same sequence of material. You could combine this directly with programming via something like Project Euler.
Short summary: find things you enjoy doing that force you to actually use the math / physics on real world problems.
Also, is there a LW meetup anywhere accessible? If so, attend that!
I really can’t speak highly enough of being around other people who you can relate to, and who can help with these problems based on a more personal understanding of what you need.
What hobbies do you have? What extracurriculars are you engaged in? Competitive math, physics, science olympiad, and similar events are a good way to learn all sorts of stuff. Pursuing a hobby that involves some engineering can be a great way to learn math and physics. Electronics, robotics, rocketry, and the like might be fruitful areas to explore, but can all rapidly exceed your budget.
Where do you live? Is there a local hackerspace / makerspace you could get to? I suspect broadening your social horizons may be an excellent bet. These may also be able to provide tools, workspace, and collaborators that might make some of the above hobbies more approachable on your budget.
I highly recommend learning to program if you haven’t already. The logical structure will help train your thinking in all kinds of useful ways. If you already know some programming, get better at it. Contribute a patch to some open source project you use.
How best to learn math depends on what kind of math and what your goals are. I think the best way to learn calculus is through learning physics. Learning number theory is fun, links reasonably well with programming, and is less likely to make your classes even more boring as you simply get further ahead in the same sequence of material. You could combine this directly with programming via something like Project Euler.
Short summary: find things you enjoy doing that force you to actually use the math / physics on real world problems.
Also, is there a LW meetup anywhere accessible? If so, attend that!
I really can’t speak highly enough of being around other people who you can relate to, and who can help with these problems based on a more personal understanding of what you need.