For the benefit of later readers, this was Scott Young’s MIT challenge, doing a full CS degree in 12 months. I saw this as rather incredible the first time I saw it, but maybe the more incredible thing was having both the circumstances and the agency to attempt it in the first place. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
Yep, that’s it! I really love that he did that. I remembered 6-9 months because he did it in just under 12, and also didn’t do it full-time for something like the second half of it. But seems like it took a bit longer.
I did my CS undergrad in about cumulative 3 months (or maybe a bit more if you count a couple physics lectures I took before I switched to CS and optimized studying hard). (At TUM which is the best German university for CS. I didn’t optimize for good grades—final grade was 2.5 - probably slightly below median.) This was over the course of 4 years during which I spent almost all my time on AI safety research.
If the curriculum had only been exams it would’ve been even faster. I spent like an average of 10h per exam learning (where the usual expectation by the credit system is like 180h).
Although I already had a bunch of CS knowledge from autodidactic learning during highschool and I am probably >+3SD, but a lot of it actually came down to optimizing study techniques.
i actually found friends who i could pay to tutor me for quite a lot of lectures. especially one friend was really good at that. but just looking through the slides and asking an AI whenever you have questions works quite decently too i think.
try to understand. see it as structured knowledge. don’t just accept and memorize facts—in CS things are usually at least a somewhat sensible solution to a problem.
recall after each section and each session
find practice exams where solutions exist. after doing an exercise, check immediately the solution. clearly understand mistakes. (if there aren’t sufficiently many public exams then use the homework exercises. there are usually solutions.
overall was probably roughly 50-50 split between learning and understanding the content and doing exercises. you can also skip some stuff that doesn’t seem worth learning.
take sufficient breaks. (i often did 1.5-2h tutor sessions with 1-2 5min breaks.)
also be rested sufficiently in general. non-stimulating rest is better than youtube or so. takes a while to remove such addictions though. you usually don’t want to deplete dopamine low enough that you have a too strong pull to stimulated rest. rather do some walking/hiking or whatever active recovery works for you.
and ofc obvious basics like sleep, reasonably healthy food, sports.
For the benefit of later readers, this was Scott Young’s MIT challenge, doing a full CS degree in 12 months. I saw this as rather incredible the first time I saw it, but maybe the more incredible thing was having both the circumstances and the agency to attempt it in the first place. https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
Yep, that’s it! I really love that he did that. I remembered 6-9 months because he did it in just under 12, and also didn’t do it full-time for something like the second half of it. But seems like it took a bit longer.
I did my CS undergrad in about cumulative 3 months (or maybe a bit more if you count a couple physics lectures I took before I switched to CS and optimized studying hard). (At TUM which is the best German university for CS. I didn’t optimize for good grades—final grade was 2.5 - probably slightly below median.) This was over the course of 4 years during which I spent almost all my time on AI safety research.
If the curriculum had only been exams it would’ve been even faster. I spent like an average of 10h per exam learning (where the usual expectation by the credit system is like 180h).
Although I already had a bunch of CS knowledge from autodidactic learning during highschool and I am probably >+3SD, but a lot of it actually came down to optimizing study techniques.
Have you written about your study technique optimizations anywhere? It would be useful if you could share them.
Not much, but here’s one post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aq84rfx3XRyLd9y2v/optimizing-feedback-to-learn-faster
Some things I did when learning:
i actually found friends who i could pay to tutor me for quite a lot of lectures. especially one friend was really good at that. but just looking through the slides and asking an AI whenever you have questions works quite decently too i think.
try to understand. see it as structured knowledge. don’t just accept and memorize facts—in CS things are usually at least a somewhat sensible solution to a problem.
recall after each section and each session
find practice exams where solutions exist. after doing an exercise, check immediately the solution. clearly understand mistakes. (if there aren’t sufficiently many public exams then use the homework exercises. there are usually solutions.
overall was probably roughly 50-50 split between learning and understanding the content and doing exercises. you can also skip some stuff that doesn’t seem worth learning.
take sufficient breaks. (i often did 1.5-2h tutor sessions with 1-2 5min breaks.)
also be rested sufficiently in general. non-stimulating rest is better than youtube or so. takes a while to remove such addictions though. you usually don’t want to deplete dopamine low enough that you have a too strong pull to stimulated rest. rather do some walking/hiking or whatever active recovery works for you.
and ofc obvious basics like sleep, reasonably healthy food, sports.