Whitepapers for Self-learning:
6 Tips for Successful Self-Learning
1. The longest path is the shortest and the shortest
path is the longest
The shortest route to learning the
craft of a field is the one that, at first glance, appears the longest. To really learn something, you must
understand the basic concepts of your field. If you try to skip, you may end up spending more time
figuring out concepts than if you had started with learning basics. Have you ever
wanted to take up a new subject, bought a book, only to make a failed attempt
at the first few chapters before submitting to a lack of foundation for the
material? Starting at the beginning
might seem daunting, but trying to skip to the goal directly is likely to fail.
If you are studying and unsure that you have the
background for something, just stop when you don't understand something and go
back to acquire that background.
2.
Avoid isolation
In school you have many effective feedback loops. If you
are confused, you can ask the lecturer for a clarification. Your homework
assignments and exams motivate you to internalize the content of the class,
whether you want to or not.
Peers can help you smooth over small
rough spots in your understanding. A decent self-learner must find others who are
familiar with the material. Naturally one prefers to find an expert, but
discussing the material with a peer can also go a long way. Having a
community is vital. Often, a byproduct of finding or building a community is
finding a mentor. The one element of graduate school that is hardest to
replicate is the advisor-advisee relationship. They help guide you,
smoothing out the uncertainties you have about certain topics, and help you
make your own learning more efficient. As a self-learner, you do not have the
convenience of scheduled class time and required problem sets. You must be
aggressive about finding people to help you.
3.
Avoid multitasking
Another reason school is great for learning is that you
plan your day around your classes. There are distractions, of course, but if
you're concerned with learning at school, you prioritize your classes over
other things. You don't have to be in a classroom or library
to study, but notice the relative isolation and focus those environments afford
over reading a book with your laptop on while writing emails and checking Facebook or Twitter
with the TV on. Remove the
distractions and allocate large blocks of time. You might find that for more
difficult material, you need larger blocks of time to study because it takes longer to shift into the
context of harder problems.
4.
You don't read textbooks, you work through them
Imagine taking a 12 hour flight with two books,
Machiavelli's "The Prince" and Shilov's "Elementary Functional
Analysis." It would be typical to finish the 100 pages of Machiavelli in
two hours or so, and spent the rest of the time working through 10 pages of a Shilov's "Elementary Functional Analysis," minus some breaks
for napping and eating undesirable airplane food. Reading a
technical book is nothing like reading a novel. You have to slow down and work
carefully if you want to understand the material. Have you ever found yourself
10 pages further in a book and having forgotten what you've just read? Successful self-learners don't read, they toil. If there are proofs, walk them through, and try
proving results on your own. Work through exercises, and make up your own
examples. Draw various diagrams and invent visualizations to help you develop
an intuition. If there is a real-world application for the work, try it out. If
there are algorithms, implement them with your favorite programming
language. If something remains
unclear, hunt down someone who's smarter than you and get them to explain.
Sometimes you just need to put the material down, step away, relax, and think
deeply to develop an intuition.
5. What to do when you don't understand
Learning
is all about abstractions. We build up abstractions on top of other
abstractions. If you do not know the abstractions you are reading about that
are being composed into new higher level abstractions, then you aren't going to
understand the new abstraction. If you get stuck, the way to get un-stuck is to
follow the I'm stuck decision tree below.
The "I'm stuck" decision tree
o
you
are familiar with the abstractions you are seeing but...
o
you
can't understand how they are being composed to form a new abstraction.
§ what you are reading is a poor
treatment of the material -> find a better treatment
§ you are rusty with the abstractions
-> go review and come back
§ you are fine with the abstractions and the treatment seems
clear -> work through it to develop an intuition.
o
you
are unfamiliar with the abstractions you are seeing
o
you
know the field, but not this particular concept -> learn the concept and
review other parts of the field on demand
o
you
are unfamiliar with the concepts, terminology, and symbols; you don't even know
what field this is part of -> you will have to step back from your current
studies, find out what field you are in, and go learn a foundation in that
field. (keep in mind that you often just need to build
a general foundation in the field, or mastery of some subset of a field - you
don't have to master the entire field.)
6. There is
nothing so practical as a good theory
"In theory, there is no
difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." -Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
Sometimes you are several hops away from something you
can code up and apply to a problem directly. Not all textbooks can be read with
application in mind, despite that they serve as the theoretical foundation for
applied work. This is why you must have a deep sense of patience and commitment
- which is why a prolonged curiosity and passion for a topic are so valuable. Understanding
analysis (particularly sets, measures, and spaces) will serve as your
foundation for a deep understanding of probability theory, and both will then
serve as your foundation for understating inference, and a deep understanding
of inference is a mainstay of achieving high quality results on applied
problems. Avoid the dualistic
mistakes of technical execution without intuition, and intuition without
technical execution.