Question number one comes from Dan. Dan says, "I'm currently pursuing a degree "in computer science and I'm having trouble "finding time to do a much needed self study." In parentheses, Dan says, "What I learned in college "is nowhere near enough," in parentheses. How much self studying do you recommend and how do you fit in with all of the schoolwork without getting overwhelmed?

Okay, well, I'm not exactly sure what self study refers to here. Do you mean you're not learning enough in the classroom to actually succeed in your computer science classes? Or do you mean there is topics you want to learn in general and you're not able to satisfy that through your college curriculum?

Either way, either way, we have a more general challenge here, which is you have an intellectual pursuit that is separate from your direct course responsibilities that you want to fit into your college life. I am familiar with this. I had my share of independent intellectual pursuits when I was a college student.

I wrote my first book, How to Become, no, How to Win at College. How to Win at College, I wrote that during my senior year at Dartmouth. I also edited a magazine and was a opinion columnist for a while, while at school. So I'm used to this idea of having non-class, intellectual but non-class related work to do while in college.

And so here's a few things to recommend to make that work. One, keep your course load reasonable. I used to do a lot of work on student stress and reducing student stress. And I can tell you one of the biggest causes of student stress, especially at elite schools, is students had course loads that were too heavy.

Double majors, majoring to minors, trying to fit in an extra course, three or four really hard courses pushed together. This is a problem. If your schedule is too hard, your entire semester is gonna be difficult. So you wanna have the most reasonable possible schedule in terms of both the overall difficulty and the diversity of different course types.

Not all quantitative, not all humanities focused. Balance types, keep the course load reasonable. If you have a lot of credits coming into college, I did some of this, cash that in later in your career to maybe have an independent study or just to take a lighter course load one year, keep your course loads reasonable.

It is the most effective thing you can do to reduce stress. I think students get what I used to call heart attack semesters on my study hacks blog back in the day they would get into these hard scheduling situations either because they weren't paying attention. When they're setting up their schedule, they're just trying to solve problems.

Well, I need this requirement and that, why don't I get this out of my way? That sounds interesting. They're just not paying attention to the impact of their choices or they're laboring under the delusion that the harder their schedule, somehow the more impressive that will make them. A lot of college students labor under this delusion that there is a college admission style committee in their future that's going to look at their schedule and say, how many things did Dan do?

How hard was Dan's schedule? To figure out whether or not to let them in. That doesn't happen after college. That's not the way job interviews work. That's not the way you move through the professional world. No one cares that your sophomore fall semester was really difficult. No one will even notice.

You suffer that pain, you get very few benefits for it. So make your course load easier, Dan, if you want to do extra work. If you're doing extra work, treat it like a major extracurricular, meaning don't have many other major extracurricular pursuits. This should be one of them. Don't be trying to edit a magazine and writing for the paper and being a part of the dance team and do major self-study.

You actually have to treat it with respect. If it's one of the things you're working on, don't put too many other extracurriculars onto your schedule. And finally, leverage autopilot schedules. Big piece of advice I give to college students, for every work that happens regularly, I always have this reading assignment in this English class.

I always have a weekly problem set in this computer science class. For work that happens regularly, figure out when and where each week that work gets done. This day, this time, then this location, that's when I do the first half of my reading. This day, this time, this location, that's when I do the second half.

My problem set, I always do one hour right after the class when it's assigned. I go to the library right next to the classroom and I prep it. I go through the problems. I see which ones I know how to solve, which ones look hard. Then I have a meeting with my problem set group.

We always do that the next night at seven here in the study room that we have a reservation for. Then I have a two hour block I always put together the next morning to clean up what we did and write it up. Whatever, these are sample schedules, but it's the same time, same day, same places.

It's an autopilot schedule because it makes you not have to actually think and make decisions about when and where you're gonna work. Should I work now? What should I work on today? It's all made automatic. So autopilot schedule your schoolwork, add the self-study into the autopilot schedule. That is how I wrote how to win a college my senior year.

90 minutes, first thing in the morning. Everyone was still asleep. I remember the Wheeler apartments for Dartmouth people. I was in the Wheeler apartments with a couple of buddies of mine. Hat tip to John. Who else was in that apartment? Lee, maybe hat tip to Lee. I don't quite remember everyone who was there, but I had a room with a radiator that would spit hot water into the air because this was very old heating technology.

And there was one of those old-fashioned, over-polished, varnished, indestructible college desks in the room. I would get up, go to the desk, and I would write 90 minutes, weekday mornings, repeat, and a book was written. All right, Dan, so I used your question as an excuse to go broader to some of my more general thoughts about getting through college.

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