I finally learned how to study

December 08, 2025

At the age of 30, I have finally found the most effective way for me to learn a subject. I am currently in Georgia Tech's OMSCS program and have been learning about computer architecture. With online lectures, it can sometimes be challenging for me to stay engaged. The vidoes may be playing and I am looking at the screen, but I zone out and end up not knowing what was just taught. This snowballs as I then go on to the next video where I get even more confused because I do not know the concepts that we are building off of.

I have never really been good at taking notes and typically when I study, I simply review slides or re-read textbook chapters. With online lectures, I have rewatched the lectures which has been helpful. But when I rewatch lectures I am still at risk of zoning out. This has largely worked, but I always end up feeling like I do not have a good understanding of the material and quickly lose that knowledge after I am done cramming.

I have had this blog for a couple years but never really got in a rhythm of posting. But I recently was reading comments on a HackerNews post about why people blog and there was a theme I started to notice. People blog so that they can learn or share what they learn. I often read blogs about topics that are new to me and then I thought that it would be nice to do something similar. I decided to write about how caches work at a basic level. By the time I was finished writing, I had such a greater understanding of the material!

As a way to prepare for my final, I began writing blog posts on all of the topics I was reviewing. This helped me immensely and I felt much more confident about the material. It is similar to the idea that the best way to learn something is to teach it. When you do that, you have to make sure you understand the topic so that you can effectively teach it. With an online program, I have less interactions with other students. But writing blog posts gives me the opportunity to teach anyone. I do not intend to publish most of the posts I have written since they are not very polished. However, I still write them as if I were publishing them. This forces me to understand the topic in a way that will allow me to communicate it differently.

Right now I have only been doing this for a few weeks while reviewing material and it is a lot of work. Watching lecture videos while also writing a blog post on it is time consuming, so I do not recommend doing this as a last minute study option. But going forward, I plan to do this from the beginning. My hope is that this will make it easier to understand the material the first time I am introduced to it.

I encourage you to try this method as well. If you need to cram for an exam, it probably won't be the best method. If there is a single topic you are not confident on, try to write a blog post. Hopefully you will find it effective as I have.