“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Søren Kierkegaard
This quote always seems to be following me around when I reflect on passed time, and I always seem to have some fresh take on it. Hindsight is a blessing and curse, you take what you’ve learnt forward, but also can be such a kicker if you had to make silly mistakes to get that knowledge.
A friend of mine recently reached out to me on discord asking for some advice around getting through university and making the most out of it, and it surprisingly had me thinking quite hard about what I would want to be told, and reflecting on what my degree got me. I want to expand on what I mean by each of the bullet points, but the TLDR is:
- Actually study. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you come to university to essentially be guided by professors and books into becoming vastly better educated in the degree you choose to study. You’re there to learn, make it your identity ruthlessly.
- Set a routine / schedule. Several hours a day of focus, every day is more than enough to understand the content to a strong level, and several hours more of practice will make the assignments seem all too easy. Repeated, compounding effort rewards the best.
- Get a summer internship / year placement. It’s almost criminal how underrated these things are, and they’ll put you at the front of the race when job hunting, or give you the skills/confidence/exposure needed to pursue your own startup/business.
- Go to societies / clubs. It’s a guaranteed way to make friends with people who have the same interests as you. Pick a couple of societies - One fun, one sport and one building/educational/career development. Bonus points if you can combine each of them. Look for active clubs that host meetings and events/projects. Don’t waste time on a club that doesn’t do anything.
- Choose who you live with wisely. Don’t just live with someone “because” - it affects your daily life massively if they’re bad housemates, irresponsible, loud, messy etc. Live with people who have respect, are ambitious and above all - you actually like!
- Do more things. Volunteer for events. Say hello to people on your course. Get into email threads with professors and teaching fellows. Make friends with the people in the campus outlets/coffee shops. Sign up for sports events. Start and finish projects with people. For the love of god, you’re paying thousands of pounds, don’t just sit in the library or your room all day.
And that’s it really. Keep yourself physically healthy, find a decently paying part time job near where you live, and study/work hard. I go into more depth below on each of the points.
Actually study
Seems obvious, but many students I’ve observed don’t actually do that much new learning, quite often the majority of time is spent doing assignments or coursework. Whilst it might seem like you’re focusing on the wrong thing by taking time away from what actually gets you the grades, setting aside one or two hours a day where you’re focused on taking in new material, revising or generally trying to understand the concepts at hand will make completing said assignments feel almost trivially easy.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln
Understanding the content, in my opinion, should be your number one priority at all times when studying. By the time you’re in university, you should at least know how you learn best, or have some kind of study system in place. But what do I mean by study? This can take many forms, but it essentially distils down into following this framework:
Sponge the content → Digest and partially regurgitate → Attempt to teach it → Plug gaps in understanding that are revealed → Repeat until understood → build/solve problems or answer questions with this new knowledge.
Of course the pathway for studying something like engineering versus philosophy or history is going to differ - some subjects will lean towards the sponging and content absorption side of things (think of the heavy reading required for history, discussion required for philosophy) where there will still be questions you can answer or debate, but less of a “correct” answer to be reached like there would be in a maths course for example. Put simply, the goal for a subject like history is to sponge as much information as possible, understand where it fits into the context of your debate domain, and be able to infer and argue viewpoints well. The construction of arguments takes practice, but studying and understanding the content will significantly improve the quality of your arguments, and make writing those assignments far easier.
Set a routine or schedule
Basic life advice really, but carving out dedicated time pays off massively in the long run. It’s true for any pursuit in life, consistency > motivation in all aspects. Set aside time every day (could be as little as an hour a day), and ensure there is always quality work completed during this time. Student life can be all over the place with scheduling, but getting time in like this is non negotiable. It even carries forward once you’re on a break/reading week! You’ll find you can work on personal projects, tinker with open source, build or read about something you really love!
Think of a stone-cutter, chipping away at what seems like an impossible task. Every day, the cutter is hammering away at this enormous piece of rock, and seems to be getting nowhere. From the outside, it may seem like there’s no progress, but one day, a single hammer strike will split an entire rock. Was it that last strike that split the rock? Or weight of all the effort before? The same way a single bucket makes no difference in filling a pool, over time if continuously filled, will begin to overflow. A simple routine that worked well for me in my first year was to wake up extremely early (I’m talking 5/4 am!), and roll out of bed onto my laptop. Whilst tough to do, it gave me several hours where I would not be interrupted by social media (nobody online), no flatmates bothering me, no noise, and you get to watch the sun come up. I’m not here to preach “just get up at 3am bro you need it!!”, sleep is far more important to you as a student. If you’re skipping hours of sleep to get in a small amount of extra study, you’re really throwing pounds to pick up pennies. Sleep is the most important thing, with diet and exercise being a close second with regard to the impact on your ability to learn effectively. Find a schedule with real time carved out, plan some genuinely achievable goals for the hours you set aside, and smash the tasks out.
Apply for summer internships / placements
Goes without saying, but experience trumps everything in the beginning. This is primarily because (IMHO!) you really don’t know what’s valuable to study, and more importantly, how what you’re studying actually impacts what you’ll do as a professional. Why does learning defensive design in those first programming classes help you on the job? You’re always taught Java in university, go find out how and why it’s used in the real world!
Having even a few weeks/months of working in a professional environment is enough to talk about in an interview, and sets you out as a candidate that cared enough about their career to try it out before committing. It also signals you’re familiar with the simple things that developers use daily. When in interviews (especially tech!), your interviewer will be especially looking to ask about what you’ve done, not necessarily what you studied. In my personal case, I remember being taught Java for several years (OOP, clean code, the whole nine yards!), but never really questioning what could be built with it? The idea of a server being written in Java was something I’d not even considered. Perhaps I was just a poor student? Regardless, interning at a massive tech company where I could suddenly read the code of hundreds of professional codebases (and see some actual applications of all of this code…), I was suddenly made aware of how what I was learning was actually applied, at scale, to make things happen.
Getting these placements is trickier than ever (fewer positions, with more people applying!). Reach out to companies, via email, get linkedin premium if you need access to contacts / emails of people. Speaking for tech specifically, there are tons and tons of startups doing tons of awesome things, and they’d be excited to take you on for a few months if you’re A) cheap for them to hire B) someone that learns quickly and won’t drag them down (i.e you can get on with meaningful work without being told what to do) and C) are able to present yourself properly. An example of this was in my firs year of university - I ended up being on a train in the UK that was cancelled before the final destination, and ended up getting an uber with the guy sitting next to me, who happened to be the CTO of a startup. Got to chatting, and learnt loads. Had I had the courage to ask for a job, I could have had some really productive months.
Take the time to write some meaningful projects that solve a real problem (not a crappy python game…), and fill your CV with them. Do something complicated, not just another website for a business. Write an agent harness for some boring task! Make a 3d renderer in some low level language! Put together a RL environment for a small but interesting task! (idk.. train a racecar to go around a track you put together or something?). With all of these, write up a blog or pretty presentation page and put them on the CV. If you’re a student in the UK, I’m almost begging you to do summer internships between the years - the time is so valuable.
Of course anyone in tech at the moment is bound to be confronted with the grim reality that entry level jobs have shrunk, and the requirements have raised with it. Placements are harder to get, harder to find, and the demands of keeping up with them has never been more difficult. The only advice I have in this regard is to rise with the tide - almost take this as a notice that you (unfortunately) need to improve to meet these new standards. List some target companies, search their employees tab for any recruiters, and cold message with a short, human written hello, and a brief intro about yourself. Take the time to work on and write some cool projects that relate to what the company does (i.e they’re some observability company, write a log parser or something) and explain how your skills match, and that you’re looking for an internship or placement. It’s not enough to just mass apply anymore, you need to be a standout in terms of the effort put in.
Good luck. It’s a harsh job climate at the moment.
Join Societies and clubs
There’s not much needs to be expanded on here. Societies are a great place to make friends, especially ones that have the same interests as you - having friends in similar areas is such a valuable thing later in life. Having graduated and started working, I’ve realised how much harder it is to network with people that have the same niche interests, so take the opportunity to do so now while everyone is also developing their network.
It’s a sensible idea to attempt to join a breadth of clubs that step across a variety of categories:
- Social - Any culture clubs, identity societies, etc (think X langauge society, LGBT soc etc)
- Intellectual - Something related to your degree / academic interests (Computing soc, ML soc etc)
- Physical - something sporty / active
- Creative/Exotic - An art or process to allow you to produce, with a creative process you enjoy going through
Attempting to expand out has a whole host of benefits - having one career related (solid way to get invites to conferences, hackathons and events etc), a sport one (great way to try new sports you’d not have exposure to otherwise) and a creative/fun one (mental health matters!) should set you up for success! To speak on the mental health benefits more, having community and keeping busy via these events is so valuable, which directly translates to a better quality of life.
Volunteering to run a society or club is also fantastic for the CV, you can talk about all sorts of events you’ve run, and being backed by a club is such a great way to get into places you wouldn’t have had before. An example from my time at university was with the BJJ society, I messaged other society clubs and they were more than keen to let us use their facilities. Had I asked alone, i probably would have gotten a no. Join a club! It’s worth the time investment.
Choose who you live with wisely
I personally was extremely lucky to have nice flatmates in my first year, which made my time far more enjoyable when living close to the university. Being around people with a mentality similar to yours will pay dividends when everyone is focused on eating / sleeping well, and studying hard for blocked out hours is the norm. Conversely, any negative qualities can negatively compound and damage your entire quality of life, so pick wisely. Use your first year to decide what qualities you’re looking for, and pick the people that fit. Living with friends also makes raising issues much easier, as the respect held by either party means that social norms and nice gestures will be extended to you.
Pick ambitious, hardworking folks, stay clean, eat and train well.
Do more things
Looking back on my university experience, I always felt I could have done more. It’s a feeling akin to having tried to workout, but not properly pushing yourself, leaving and then feeling disappointed that you didn’t give it 100%. Whilst I studied, there’s always a part of me that felt as if there was capacity for more. More hours to give studying topics in depth, more time to build, create and explore, but this would never be done. I feel that I could have joined more clubs, led more things. I coasted through some of my classes, and could have tried more. At the time, I felt like I was working hard, but looking back, it’s clear I only extracted 65% of the total value of my time studying.
If you’re currently in this phase of your life, I implore you to do more. Say yes to more things - seek out opportunity where you can. The free time you have now can be the greatest opportunity to boost your knowledge, life and career, don’t waste it.