A lot of what makes college different is most of the professors aren't good teachers aren't aren't all that interested in teaching.

Well maybe you shouldn't put too much weight on teachers or lectures in the first place.

Everything that is being taught is quite likely derived entirely from the textbooks in the syllabus. Lectures are also time limited, littered with people of varying experience asking questions during (if at all), while the person at the front of the class draws or recites with varying quality, worsened by accents, lack of coffee, or pure lack of interest, the person in behind the lectern might even die suddenly (in the middle of a sentence even, n=1 myself).

The textbook will probably be far more rigorous than lecture ever was anyway, and you can take whatever speed you want.

That formula worked for me for entirety of undergrad, and it was expected of me during my graduate studies. If I had better control of the internet or material on the internet was as good as they are today, I am certain any other student could do the same.

I agree here too. Grad studies was a new lesson altogether -- not just how to study but how to teach yourself whole topics it would now be assumed you know :)

it sounds like you're saying that grad school trains people to be autodidacts

Just that mine did. I couldn't effectively do new research if I didn't understand the latest research, and there often wasn't someone to teach it. I found my advisor would guide but rarely lecture. This is especially true as my research was cross disciplinary, so I had to know topics that had nothing to do with my own undergrad.

interesting, thanks!

this really depends on where you go to college. I went to a small liberal arts college (not one of the "good" ones), and my profs loved teaching. It was their whole job, they did almost no research (the cs depts research was all "how to teach cs" type research). Seeing how other people experienced undergrad, I couldn't be happier.

Well, that and the material growing far more complicated and demanding. I always had peers and online access to excellent teachers for any subject, if the professor wasn’t cutting it!

This will be fairly unpopular, but we idolize _all_ teachers too much. Wait - Let me qualify that. Teaching, like all professions, has people who are not good at their jobs or just want to coast through. Hell there are doctors who do just that, despite medicine education taking a huge part of their life - but there are less of them for that reason. Teaching doesn't require as significant year sink as medicine tends to.

Not all teachers are good. Some are just atrocious ones with ego, and a lot are there just for the tenure.

I need the version of this guide that's written for those of us who never hit that challenge in school, but got absolutely clobbered in real life by the fact that most success depends on incremental effort over time, not immediate or last-second success.

People kept telling me it would happen at the next level of schooling, and I kind of wish it had. At least then I might have learned what to do about it without the risk of "failure means I have to live outside."

I hit a wall in the same way, but quite a bit earlier, sometime at the latter end of middle school. It was especially clear in semester-long final projects. I could get through things on a day-to-day basis, often by last-minute effort but sustaining progress on something that was so far in the future (initially) tripped me up. I wished my classes in middle/high school had adopted the technique of requiring progress steps throughout the semester.

Same. The thing I had to learn very late is that you have to do the homework. Always. That's something I never had to do up until college.