5 Tips for Learning Difficult Material
Learning is an essential skill as an engineer. New technology is always emerging and the skills needed for a particular design are always changing. Learning new skills isn’t always easy, especially when you progress past what Youtube can teach you. I wasn’t always successful in my learning endeavors. When I finished my undergraduate degree I was grateful to be done with school forever. I swore that I would never go back to school. As an undergraduate I felt like I was clawing my way through, just trying to get an acceptable grade. There were a few classes here and there that I did well in, but for the most part I just did what I needed to in order to finish my degree.
Fast forward five years and I walked into BYU for the first day of my PhD. I was scared to death of coming back to face more technical courses (see Chris Mattson’s article on being scared of math), and the dreaded PhD qualifying exams. In the couple of years before coming back to school most of my professional work was in marketing, and I had not done technical engineering work for years. Taking derivatives and working with Matlab were distant memories. Even though I was worried about being successful, in the years since my undergraduate degree I had many new strategies on how to learn. I still don’t feel like I’m at the top of the class, many lectures still go over my head, but I now know how to be successful in learning. Here are a few of the lessons I have gained on how to learn anything:
Take an honest self assessment
It took a long time for me to take a look at where I was weak in my learning and productivity strategies. If you aren’t sure where to start, ask someone close to you to help. Once you have a picture of where your learning strengths and weaknesses are, use that knowledge to your advantage.
The next assessment you need to take is to identify where your knowledge gaps are for the material you are trying to learn. Recognize the points that are the most important for you to learn and focus on those.
Focus
It’s all too easy to be distracted. This has been one of my main struggles through the years. Look for what distractions keep you from learning. Seek to control your learning environment to optimize your learning. There are a few different tools that helped me improve my focus. The first was a mindfulness app. I used Headspace, but Calm or Sanvello are also good choices. Meditation or mindfulness has been shown in studies to improve concentration1. I feel like my brain wanders less when I do even a one or two minute meditation consistently. Second, I used technology against itself with apps to block distractions from other apps or programs. The app I used is called Freedom, and it works on desktop or mobile. You can set schedules on what to block, but be careful, this is a much stronger approach than say Apple’s iPhone Screen Time app. Once you start a schedule it is more difficult to bypass, which for me was a good thing. These two things gave me more productive time when I was learning.
Utilize the resources you have
Take a look at what resources are available for a given subject. They may be textbooks, videos, research articles, or people. Take some time before you dive into a subject to understand what resources are available and how you can best make use of them. I usually start with a quick search on Google to see what is available. Are there Youtube videos, tutorial websites, blogs, etc.? Don’t forget about utilizing the library for finding available books. While working remotely, I have missed being able to go look at the most important books on a topic. I’ll give you one more piece of advice if you are a student: don’t sell back your books. I have gone back and bought many textbooks I used to have because they are such good references. Yes much of the information can be found online, but there is a good reason people pay for the information from textbooks.
The second part of available resources that is important not to forget is people. As an introverted engineer, it can be really hard to approach people, but you can’t let that stop you. It took me a long time to feel comfortable openly admitting where my knowledge gaps are and looking for the experts to help fill in those gaps. Experts may be people in industry, professors, TA’s, researchers, or university students. When seeking help from people always be considerate of the expert’s time. They are probably very busy, but that doesn’t mean they won’t love to share their knowledge with you.
Understand the fundamental principles
If you can understand the fundamental principles of a subject you will be able to utilize that knowledge in many other applications, but if you don’t understand the principles your application of a subject will be narrow. When I was preparing for my PhD qualifying exams I had to be prepared for anything from the subject of the test. To prepare myself for this I practiced with any examples I could and tried to understand the principles of every step in the process. Understanding fundamental principles is the way to master a subject
Iterate
Continue to improve your process for learning. Find what does and doesn’t work for you. This is an important lesson for most things in life. If you refine your processes you will win back valuable time. See the BDR article on iteration. Also while studying for my qualifying exams, I initially spent a lot of time reading whole chapters from textbooks thinking that I would read through most of the important chapters of the book and then do the practice questions at the end. The problem with that was it took WAY too long. I was falling behind on my study plan and there was no way I would have passed if I continued to study that way. Since my original study method wasn’t working I iterated until I came to doing practice problems first and then filling in the gaps as needed from the body of the textbook. Recognize what isn’t working and iterate until you find something that does work.
A few tips on school specific learning:
Make friends, I know engineers aren’t the most social creatures, but find other people to work with whenever you can.
Get help from TA’s, I now make it a habit to be at every office hour for a TA until my assignments are complete. It is literally their job to help you learn.
Get to know your professors, don’t be afraid to show what content you might be struggling with. Ask questions until you understand.
Actually do your pre-class reading. Even if you don’t understand much of what you read, the initial exposure to the content will make the lectures more worthwhile for you.
