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How to Study in College: The 3 Changes That Fixed My Cornell Grades
Austin Starks got the lowest score in his Calculus II class at Cornell. High school had never made him study, so he arrived with no method at all, and he had to build one.
The first change was where the work happened. He had always done homework alone, in his room or in the library, and alone was the problem. He started doing it in office hours instead, where people are paid to make sure you understand the material, and he worked more problems than were assigned.
The second change was realizing his classes were not all the same. Organic chemistry, discrete math and physics are problem-solving classes; psychology, biology and Spanish are memorization classes, and he had been studying both the same way. For the problem-solving classes he did nothing but practice problems, closer to a neural network running gradient descent: see what you know, find what you got wrong, look up the right procedure, repeat until the score converges. For the memorization classes he did the opposite, turning every lecture note into a flashcard and writing his own practice quizzes. That was before ChatGPT, so all of it was by hand; today NotebookLM does the same job in about a minute.
The third change was time. He stopped cramming and worked backwards from each exam date, so the last two days were spent reviewing what he already knew instead of learning it for the first time.
The result on the transcript: one semester at twenty three credit hours including discrete math, biochemistry and physics, a 3.631 cumulative GPA, and a B+ in the calculus class that started it, above the class median of a B.
Transcript
0:00I got the lowest score in my calculus class at Cornell.
0:02High school never made me study.
0:04I got fives on every AP exam without opening a book.
0:08Studying is a skill, and I was starting from nothing.
0:10Here are the three things I did.
0:12The first thing I changed was where I did the work.
0:15I had always done homework alone, in my room or in the library, and alone was the problem.
0:20So I started doing it in office hours instead.
0:22There are people sitting in that room who are paid to make sure you understand the material.
0:26I also did more problems than were assigned.
0:29The second thing was realizing my classes were not all the same.
0:32Organic chemistry, discrete math and physics are problem solving classes.
0:37Psychology, biology and Spanish are memorization classes.
0:40I had been studying all of them the same way, which worked in high school because none of it was hard.
0:45For the problem solving classes I did nothing but practice problems.
0:49I did not read the text book.
0:50I often skipped lecture.
0:52I was basically a neural network doing gradient descent.
0:55See what I know, find what I got wrong, look up the right procedure, and run it again until my score converged on one hundred.
1:02For the memorization classes I did the opposite.
1:04I turned every lecture note into a flashcard and drilled them until I knew all of it, then wrote my own practice quizzes to prove it.
1:11This was before ChatGPT, so I did all of it by hand.
1:15Today I would make NotebookLM do it in a minute.
1:17The third thing was time.
1:19I stopped cramming.
1:21Once I knew a test date I worked backwards from it and gave myself more room than I needed, so that the two days before the exam I was reviewing what I already knew instead of learning it for the first time.
1:31One semester I took twenty three credit hours, including discrete math, biochemistry, and physics.
1:37That is how I got a three point six at Cornell.
1:40And that calculus class, the one where I got the lowest score on the first exam?
1:44I finished Calculus II with a B plus, which put me above the class median of a B.
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