Getting the most out of classes in college

I wrote before about my issues with school. I still feel the same.

That being said, I am still going to college. I’m enrolling and classes and working towards a major. I sometimes ask myself why. I also sometimes do not have a good answer.

Let’s assume that we take be being in college as a given, though.

Under that assumption, we can refer to it as a sunk cost. Therefore, the next question is, how do you make the most of the time spent in school?

What about in classes specifically?

Despite how infrequently I stay true to this, classes are a great opportunity to learn. Assuming we are in school and taking a class, then there’s a question that we can ask.

How do we take best advantage of the class?

Some people optimize for a combination of maximum grade with minimum work.

Some people optimize for maximum grade and do not care how much work it takes.

Others optimize for maximum learning, with grade coming secondary.

Some give zero fucks and just try to get through it.

Here are my thoughts:

We are paying all of this money and spending this time in school, so we should be getting out of it the maximum amount.

From an academic perspective:

I don’t really want to talk about how to decide what to study because that is a really hard and complex question. I have many thoughts on it, though, and would love to share them if you are interested.

Instead, I want to talk about individual classes. The first piece is signing up for classes. One of the pieces of advice I love the most came from Naval Ravikant when he said “explore your intellectual curiosities.” These can lead to new places and direction. The only thing I’ll say is that despite how it might fit in with the bigger picture or any preconceived notions you have, taking a class because you are interested in it is plenty of rationale to do so.

It is important at the beginning of a semester to set goals for a class. Despite my initial excitement for every class that I was enrolled in this semester, personally, I have only gotten a lot out of one of them (and I’m in 7!). That’s because for each micro-level choice, I have opted away from the school-route. “Go to class for 90 minutes when you could look at the notes for 10 later vs. do anything else for 90 minutes.” Easy choice. But then it becomes “do this extra reading about macroeconomics that would shed a bit more light into how the economy works vs. sleep for an extra 20 minutes.” Without scale, that reading does not add much value.

This has lead me to study last minute for tests, though, and, most likely, fundamentally miss out on some things that I could have learned. The primary reason is because I did not set goals at the beginning of the semester. If I had, I think the amount of effort I would pour into school would not have increased that dramatically and I could have gotten significantly more out of the classes.

Setting goals at the beginning for each class paint a roadmap of where you are trying to get by the end of the semester. That would make at least me personally more invested to accomplish certain tasks.

We can take for given that we are enrolled in the class and that we will spend some minimum time, X, to do the necessary assignments and work towards a reasonable grade. Therefore, the value of X + some extra time we could call Y is often greater than only spending X time and using Y towards other things. I have found that there are increasing returns to scale, up to a point, with classes. The more you immerse yourself in the readings, work and ideas, the more you can live in what you are learning and take something out. Cramming for a test of half-assing the assignments because you can will help you accomplish the reasonable grade goal, but that is about it.

This statement is not for all classes, and this is also not an ode to go to classes that are a waste of time. Rather, it is to say that in the moment it is easy to shirk and avoid extra work, despite the positive benefit it would have when looking more broadly.

I’m also assuming you are in classes you would be able to get something out of with the right amount of time, which is not necessarily a very reasonable assumption.

We are taking the classes no matter what, though. Therefore, that extra time, Y, can sometimes be a huge benefit. Connecting with your teacher or finding ways to meet the smartest people in your class can also be high leverage depending on the situation. Taking an extra hour to study for a test because you are doing it with someone else might be super worthwhile if you establish a longstanding friendship with that person, as an example.

Lots of thoughts and issues but not enough solutions. Education is tough.