5 Tips for Computer Science Students

0:00 hello everybody and welcome back so as you all know my name is Tim I'm a computer science major currently in my second year and I've just finished my third semester what I'm gonna be doing in this video is sharing with you my tips and strategies for doing well in computer science and surviving the harsh workload that comes with a major like computer science now this video is probably going to relate to people that are in engineering fields or science fields as well anything that shares a similar amount of workload to a major like computer science as they are you know fairly similar programs at least in the beginning years so before I get too far into this I'm gonna give you a very brief background on Who I am why I'm even qualified to be giving you this information so essentially my name is Tim as I've said I'm a computer science major I run this YouTube channel where I teach programming this is pretty much my full-time job I would say I probably

0:46 commit five or six hours a day to working on this channel and to on my business and the rest of the time during my day I focus on school so after three semesters my current GPA I believe is in nine point four out of ten I'll put that up my unofficial transcript so you guys can get the exact figure but I'm pretty sure off the top of my head that's what it is and I think that is equivalent to a 4.0 on a 4.0 GPA scale so clearly I know how to spend my time I know how to get things done and that's why I'm gonna be sharing some tips with you guys here today so without further ado let's get into my first tip for surviving and doing well in computer science alright so my first and most important tip is to spend your time wisely and be very very careful the activities that you participate in that are wasting your time now let me kind of explain what I mean by

1:31 this to break this down I hope all of you would agree with me is that if you had unlimited time you could get an A+ in every single class you can do extremely well and you know everything will be fine you'd have enough time to do everything you need so the goal really here should be to maximize the amount of time you can spend doing things that you find for yourself productive right that you think was a good use of your time and the way that you can do this is to take one day your average school day maybe even a week actually and this might help and keep track of the activities you do in a day keep track of exactly what you get done and how long you spend doing different things now I'm telling you this because I know you guys are gonna realize when you look at that log afterwards how much time you're wasting and I'm not just talking about a few ow here and there I'm talking about entire

2:16 day's worth of work just gone into the abyss just destroyed because they're spent doing things that you don't really care about that you're kind of just doing to waste time now obviously you have to have the mindset to do this you have to want to do better in school you have to want to get things done but if you have that mindset all you need to do is really just be careful in the ways in which you spend your time and stop doing activities that waste your time stop watching seven hours of TV every single day stop watching you know four hours of useless YouTube videos at night unless they're tech whatin programming YouTube videos right but that is kind of my point here you want to evaluate your time and be extremely careful in the activities that you participate in because if you don't find those meaningful activities you shouldn't be doing them now this obviously comes with a balance right and if you can do this

3:01 and you can eliminate activities you don't care about you're gonna have more time to do things that you do care about and that's not even just school that could be working on a side project that could be hanging out with your friends maybe you go and play sports but if you can just eliminate the things that you don't care about from your life and those time wasting activities that really just eat up big chunks of your day you're gonna be much much better off I can tell you and I did this in first semester no joke absolutely no exaggeration I would say after a week of kind of employing this technique of really being careful with the way that I spend my time I was four or five times more productive since then from them and now I mean you guys can probably gauge how much I can actually do in a day that is simply because I don't waste time now I want to give you one very good example of how you can actually do this how you can stop wasting time now this is gonna

3:47 sound like a very strange kind of request but I hope a lot of you would agree with me when I say most of our professors don't really teach very effectively they don't you know convey information well and what they teach in that hour-and-a-half lecture you can probably learn on your own in about 45 minutes the first week of school every week what I do in my strategy is I go to class and rather than listen for all the course content I mean I do that a bit what I do is I evaluate my professor and I determine whether or not this person is an effective teacher so that I know whether I'm going to go to their class for the rest of the year or not and in that one day I make the decision whether I'm going or whether I'm not and honestly most of the time my decision is I'm not going to go and doing that has actually increased my grades a ton because what I've been able

4:34 to do is now rather than spending probably two hours by the time I walked to class and walked back in a lecture hall with someone that can't teach me anything I learned on my own at my desk and it takes me 20 minutes and this has allowed me so much more time to just be able to study and get things done because I'm not having my time wasted by someone that can't teach me something effectively so something to think about again not really recommending this but just you know kind of keep it in the back of your head that is how I really employ this technique and it seems a bit drastic he seems like I should tell you to go to class but if you're not learning anything in class there's really no point alright so time for tip number two which is gonna be get organized now we just talked about time management for a long time I apologize that went on for longer than I expected but if you can now manage your time effectively and

5:19 you've cut out the activities from your day that you shouldn't be doing or that you don't want to do that aren't considered productive to yourself what you can do now is really really get super efficient by getting organized now what I mean by that is really keeping track of everything so every assignment every every lecture every midterm everything you have you should have that written down you should have that storage somewhere personally for me I use a Google Calendar and what I do during syllabus week is I read through all my syllabuses and I add every single assignment every single lab every single lecture everything that I have in my calendar and the reason I do this is because this allows me to open up my calendar and at any point in time be able to tell you exactly what I kind of need to be working on and get done and not get lost and forget about activities another thing that I do is I

6:04 have a whiteboard I you can't see it there over here and whenever I have an activity I need to do I immediately write it down on my whiteboard the reason I do this is because when I get back in my room after class or when I wake up in the morning it's right there in front of my face I see that activity and I can't forget about not doing that there's so many times where you tell yourself you know the night before I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna grind this I'm gonna do that I'm gonna do all this and then you get up and none of it happens for me I find it really helps to have a visual somewhere that you can see it somewhere that you can just pan your head from your desk to see all of the things that you need to do now some people might find this overwhelming I understand that but for me its moe evading to try to wipe those things off of the whiteboard and get them done so just make sure you're keeping track of everything you need to do and that you have all of those different things ready and you can at any point in time realize

6:50 okay next week I'm gonna be really busy maybe I gotta do a little bit more more work right now so my third tip and this one is actually extremely important as well is to get things done early we're immediately when they're assigned to you now what I do personally is when I'm given an assignment or I'm given a lab or something like that I do it as soon as I possibly can as soon as that comes up on my brightspace which is my virtual campus where I have all this stuff I just do it and I get it out of the way and I get it done the reason I need to do this is because I have a lot of work I need to do for this YouTube channel and if I let schoolwork pile up there will be times where I will have to dedicate two or three days to finish all of that school work and to get that done and I don't have that luxury I need to be able to do this so for me the way that I you know kind of combat that is by when I get something I do it

7:35 immediately I never let things stack and I never let things pile up and that also allows me to live very stress-free there's never a point in time where I wake up and my assignments due at midnight and I haven't finished it yet and that is a whole new lifestyle that I'm sure a lot of you probably have never experienced before but it really makes things a lot easier on yourself getting things done early you know you're incrementally kind of doing work throughout the semester and you're not just waiting for weekends where you just grind and just spend 18 hours doing homework assignments and you're just stressed and you don't know if you're gonna get something done and you end up getting a poor grade on it it's just this really lets you relax by doing this immediately when you get it yes you know it's a pain maybe you don't have time the day to get it done but as soon as you possibly can get an assignment done as soon as it's assigned that's the best

8:22 time to do it because you're never piling up and you're allowed to kind of live stressful eat free and relax and for me you know if I want to take a day off I want to lie down for 20 minutes I'm allowed to do that because everything I need to do has been done I haven't let it and they pile up and I only have a little bit of work that needs to come so that's a really big tip I know a lot of you guys aren't going to do this but just trust me when I tell you this makes your life so much easier so much less stressful and allows you to take a break to relax because obviously everyone needs that they need that balance okay so my tip number 4 and again this one is just this makes big difference when it comes to actually getting a better grade and doing better in the program in general is do well extremely well in everything before the midterm and the final so we not first kind of I want to say third of the semester you should do

9:08 extremely well now the reason I'm saying this is because this is the easiest time to do well the only things you're probably going to have in a computer science or engineering degree is gonna be quizzes which are like you study a day or two before the thing and you should be able to do well on those assignments which are take-home there's absolutely no excuse to not do well on assignments and labs which are usually just free marks anyways if you can do well on these sections you can secure yourself you know usually a good chunk of your grade before you get to the midterm or the final and for me I know most of my classes there's about a 20% chunk of the grade that comes from all that stuff that's not the midterm or the final doing well on this helps you a ton but I don't understand why people you know take this for granted and don't do well on it I see so many people that just you know bomb the assignments or

9:54 you know the Obama midterm and they just say oh it doesn't matter because my final will override my mark and what I'm saying by that is there's a lot of programs I think my program most of the classes are like this if you do better on your final exam than your current grade your current grade just becomes your final exam or at least like it'll override the midterm there's some formulas for that but why would you ever want to do this to yourself why do you want to put you know your entire grade so you say you have a 40 and you're like oh it's fine I'll just do well on the exam on this one exam that's now gonna be pretty much 95% of your mark this is the hardest thing to do well on it's the most amount of content it's during the most stressful time of the year and you're saying it's fine I don't need to do anything in the easy point in the year because when it comes to the really hard part of the year and I have five classes that I need to do this for I'll

10:40 be fine it just doesn't really make any sense if you can do really well in the beginning the semester do really well on the midterm you're not gonna be that stress going into the exam because all you need is a 40% to pass the class and you know you can just have a better grade in general a lot of times for me you know I don't really study that hard for my exams I'll get like a seventy on the exam but because I have a hundred in the rest of the class I'll finish with a ninety right and that's kind of what you want to do that's what you want to allow yourself to get just well in the beginning in the year get all that easy stuff out of the way go to all the labs do all these you know what tedious things that are gonna build your grade up and then during the exam you know try your best study wealth but if you don't it's not a big deal and you don't need to stress about it so my last and final tip this one's not crazy important but it definitely makes a difference is to make friends and use

11:25 the resources available to you now a lot of people go through school and they just go and they do it solo and they say you know it's me I got this I don't need help I don't need to go to the guidance office I don't need friends I don't need and they just go and they just grind you know usually they end up doing okay but I can tell you being someone that's capable of doing that it's way easier if you just have a few friends and you work with them and get some stuff from them the amount of times that I feel okay just skipping a class because I know one of my friends will send me the notes or he'll let me know if something is important is crazy that's a really massive advantage that you want to give yourself and everyone really like wants to be your friend a lot of people in these programs are fairly nice you know they're in the same boat as you there's Facebook group chats there's so many resources and you don't need to do everything on your own you know work in a team make some friends like team up

12:12 with people in your computer science classes get to know them and use each other you know they'll probably ask you for help and then you can ask them for help back so use your resources use everything available and be smart and that's kind of the whole point of this video it's just be smart about the way in which you're doing things I will never tell you to grind and work as hard as you possibly can for school and do all that that's not at all what I want to say to you guys what I want to say is just be smart you know make a good decision when it comes to what you're doing get things done early manage your time well stay organized these things aren't that hard to do and they're gonna bring you from genuinely like a 70 percent to an 85 or a 90 and that's exactly what they did for me when I really start employing this techniques into my daily schedule so anyways that has kind of been this video I'd love to

12:58 hear from you guys what you thought of these tips do you agree do you disagree obviously this isn't gonna work for everyone and this is my kind of you know standpoint and viewpoint of the things that work well but I figured I would share it with you guys because I know a lot of you are in computer science and you can benefit so leave a comment before you go with your best tip for computer science majors or for students the way that you study in the way that people can you know get better and with that being said I hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did leave a like subscribe to the channel and I will see you in another one