Ever feel overwhelmed? Intellectually? (longish)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I don’t really mean time-wise, though that often does play a factor. learning a new language is a bit easier if you have free time to dedicate to it. I mean intellect, skills or memory, etc.

I consider myself a realist when it comes to my intelligence. I haven’t had an IQ test, officially (just one at a library), and so I like to just consider myself pretty average. I would say there are just as many, or only a few more people smarter than me, as are seemingly dummer.

Since I’ve started college, I’ve come to realize just how much I don’t know, and how much there is that I will never know. Gone are the days where I thought “if I went to school I can learn as much as I want.” Not anymore. I think I forget things slightly faster than I learn them, so I have to constantly use what I learn or it poofs, as if it never existed.

Keeping up in school gets harder and harder (and I have a relatively easy major), I am lost in my Linux class, the teacher talks too fast and the questions in class are above my head. Seems everybody in class are Grade A hackers that know everything about shell scripting and the like. Not me, I can’t remember commands he taught last week. I have to make a cheat sheet to remember them all.

I don’t know if it is an age thing, but time flies way too fast. I have to start working 30 hours a week on top of 15 credit hours, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed with homework and projects when I only work 15 hours.

Am I stupid, or is this common? For those of you on the high end of the spectrum of intelligence (lots of youse here), how effortless is school? For those in the hump of the bell curve like myself, do you have similar problems?

It has gotten worse lately though. I start doubting myself and wondering if I even have what it takes to get through this. In lab, we have to make a simple web page. I started making web pages about a year ago I guess, self teaching and the like, but even after one lecture, some of the people in my class that have never done it, get done before me!

I feel so overwhelmed with all the information coming at me so fast, and with the realization that it is all pretty general and “entry level.” We learn something about security, and are told that this is just the basics, it would take three our four semesters to learn what you should know.

I definately see why, for the most part, people specialize. Even in IT.

2

I’ll state the obvious: College is hard.

You’re not alone and you’re not stupid. I’ve been working on my B.S. for many years. Trying to make a living while taking classes is painful.

Everyone comes to higher education with different skills and resources. It takes time to find your strengths and weaknesses.

Somethings that have helped me:

Its not about getting an “A”. Given the choice between acing a class and taking time to get experience, take the opportunity to do something. (I have a 2.5 GPA, but I have been published in Oncology.)

*There is always going to be someone better. * At first, this drove me nuts. I’d spend hours studying, on top of work, and there was always someone who is also working full-time and getting better grades. Now, I have filed this under “different skills and resources.” The other student may have a supportive boss, or just really loves the subject. (I’m a biology student, with no love for Organic Chemistry. Others did very well in this class because they enjoyed it.)

3

I fancy myself on the medium-high end of the spectrum, IQ-wise. If I understand MENSA’s qualifications correctly, I qualify. But, I’m not some super-genius prodigy-type. Just bright.

Undergraduate life was grand, my classes were easy, except for those that weren’t. Organic Chemistry was not quite a breeze, but certainly not the nightmare some people thought it was. Strengths was misery, but that’s cause I didn’t care, as much as because I didn’t get it. (and most of the people in my major agreed).

I cried the first time I got back a Physcis test–my score was not an A. I couldn’t believe it. I pulled of an A- by the end of the semester.

In grad school, I met my match. I found that rather than be a smart fish in my (fairly smart) pond, I was now an average fish, or worse in a pond filled with very smart fish. I also had issues with not being as well prepared as my classmates from India or China, and chronic lack of ambition. I didn’t quite flunk out, but I did not obtain a master’s degree in the field I tried for. Some of that was due to poor grades, some due to bad match with advisor.

Most of us, wherever we fall on that bell curve of IQs, sometimes find ourselves in the position of being bright and knowledgable, or at least appearing that way relative to others. Likewise, most of us sometimes find ourselves feeling stupid, ill-prepared and overwhelmed.

(I’m curious, how old are you? I can’t tell. You don’t have to tell me, it’s none of my business, but it might affect people’s ability to give you advice, if you are looking for advice or commiseration if you are looking for commiseration).

4

I have two things to tell you. First, no human can absorb the entirety of all knowledge, and sooner or later, we all realize that the hard way. What you are going through is normal. Everyone goes through it; the only difference is when it happens, and whether you realize that it’s happening. You’re already much better off than the fellow who is just as lost, but thinks e still knows everything (and I guarantee that there are one or two such folks in your classes).

The second thing I have to tell you is, don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. Your teacher has office hours. If you have TAs for any of your classes, they have office hours, too. The department might have some sort of help center. There are other professors in the department. You have classmates. All of these people will be able to help you with difficulties, to some extent, and most of them will be quite willing or even eager to do so. If the teacher goes too fast in class, raise your hand and ask em to repeat something. If you’re having trouble with a homework assignment, stop by es office and ask for help. If your classmates seem to be doing better than you, ask them what their secret is. You don’t have to go it alone.

5

That’s the beginning of wisdom.

I experienced that quite a bit. The thing was, at the end of the semester, their grades usually weren’t any better than mine. I finally figured out some of them were just sitting in the front of the room and being verbal about their knowledge to impress the professors. I think those people became managers. I became an engineer.

I’m not on the high end of the intelligence scale, but it was not effortless. I had to work my ass off. But, I think you’ll find if you keep plugging away and putting in the effort, lightbulbs will start going on. With each lightbulb, you’ll gain a little confidence. With each gain in confidence, you’ll be less intimidated with the next class. Then you will think you can handle anything. That’s the most valuable thing I got from college.

Just keep on plugging.

6

It seems like a lot of Dopers have run into this problem, and I’m no exception. I like to put intelligences into three categories:

  1. Those who have to work hard at learning right from their childhood.
  2. Those who find learning easy until some point in high school or college.
  3. Those who never have to work at learning.

Naturally, category 3 is very rare (although I do know at least two of them personally), and it should be emphasized that these are generalizations, so there aren’t hard and fast boundaries. That said, it seems that a bunch of us hereabouts are in category 2, and in some ways we have it the worst. The category 1 folks get used to hard work from day one, and that never changes. Many of them are very successful, very smart people, because they work so hard at it.

Us category 2 folks are fine until the other shoe drops. Then we have to switch gears and learn how to work hard. For me, that happened as an undergraduate a couple of years ago, and I’m just now starting to be happy with the switch I’ve made.

Epimetheus, if this doesn’t describe your situation, forget I said anything. If it does, then what you need to do is start building good work/study habits and gradually things will come together again.

7

Not being able to remember commands is no great crime. I have to look up just about every function I call each time until I’ve called it just sooooo many times that it finally sinks in. Yet I can program in many different languages and program better than anyone else my age that I’ve met so far.

Just understand the concepts. Anything that can be learned through rote memorization isn’t really worth keeping about in your brain; it mostly just takes up space that could be used for better things.

As Mouse Maven pointed out, getting an A shouldn’t be your goal, nor showing up your classmates. You are the one paying for your courses. That means that you are the one who decided that there was something to be gained by going to college, and you are the only one who knows specifically what that is. If you’re getting the information you want, then you only need to do well enough to not flunk out.

Companies don’t care what your GPA was, just whether you’re someone who can accomplish something. Make sure that you can figure out how to accomplish stuff and you’re gold on a platter.

As an example of what I mean, I was taking Japanese courses in college. I got straight D’s throughout and ended up as the most fluent student of all of my classmates. Certainly they could all do better on a test of a specific word list, but I didn’t see any value in learning lists of words, so instead of doing homework, I read comics in Japanese and watched TV shows, and spent my classroom time trying to talk as much as I could in Japanese. When we had to give speaches in class, everyone else had a prewritten document that they’d written painstakingly the night before, while as I just had an outline and spoke freely. Certainly the others used more accurate terminology, and as said I got straight D’s, but I used my time as I saw fit to get what I wanted, not what my teacher asked for.

If you aren’t getting what you want out of your class, figure out how you can, even if it means ignoring your assignments. Or if you are getting it, then who cares if you’re not getting the best grade there is? As said, you’re the one paying to teacher. They’re not paying you.

8

When it comes to computer-type stuff (programming and the like), my limited experience is that, compared to other subjects, there are some people who just get it—it comes naturally to them. For others, their brain doesn’t work that way. Some people take longer to catch on, and some never do.

Epimethius, you’re definitely intelligent. You’d have to be to write as well as the OP is written. Some college students have trouble writing in complete sentences. You say you have a relatively easy major, but it’s possible that a different one would come easier to you. I’m not suggesting you switch majors, at least not without doing some research and soul-searching, but it’s at least a possibility.

Also, those other people who seem to be learning more quickly and easily: maybe they’re working fewer hours, or otherwise have fewer demands on their time. Being fatigued vs. well-rested can have a lot to do with how well your brain works.

9

**Spatial Rift **nailed it, at least as far as my experience goes. I’m in his group 2, having sailed so easily through high school and my first year of college (at a liberal arts school). Then I transferred to an engineering school and hit the wall. Everyone seemed to be smarter than I was. I couldn’t understand anything. I had tests with failing grades. It sucked. A lot.

So yeah, I think a lot of people go through or have been through what you’re going through. But an awful lot of us got through it and, I think, are now stronger and more empathetic people for having had that experience. Before that, I couldn’t really understand how others struggled with school. Suddenly, it all became crystal clear. And that’s not necessarily a bad life experience to have.

As others have said, in the end, grades don’t really matter. No one has asked me for my GPA at job interviews for years. I kinda wish I had been able to worry less about that when I was in school. I spent a lot of time and energy stressing over my grades. If I could pass on one hard-won piece of wisdom, it’d be that: grades don’t matter. Learn what you went to school to learn, and don’t worry about competing with your classmates. It’s just not worth the stress.

10

This is a great point that took me a while to learn when in college. I majored in Anthropology, which is mostly learning to observe, then try to come to conclusions about what you have observed. It’s definitely a people watching + analysis type major. (Biological anthro. and archaeology are a bit more science focused within anthro. than linguistic and cultural anthro.) There’s a lot of focus on finding patterns and not trying to take your own experiences and impress them upon your observations. I was great at it. I was, however, miserably bad at existential philosophy. I tried taking the intro course to existentialism one semester, and had to drop it after five weeks. Those five weeks that I tried to understand the material were pure torture. I had nightmares about trying to understand the materials assigned, and no matter how well it was explained to me, it was very difficult for me to understand even the most basic of concepts. It just was beyond my own understanding, and thus I had to give up if I wanted to keep a decent GPA and my own sanity.

I’ve accepted that there are some areas that I’m going to be really good in that others cannot comprehend, and that there are going to be some areas where, no matter how hard I try, I will not be able to succeed in understanding and applying the principles of that area. I also have accepted that there are areas in which I can succeed, but it takes me longer to fully understand what I am doing than in the areas where I automatically understand what’s going on.

You seem to be doing well enough to comprehend what you need to, but that you’re at a slower pace than others in your classes. Don’t try to compete with them for grades; the point is that you’re supposed to be learning how to execute this knowledge for your own benefit. If it requires you to practice executing commands in a program over and over and over again until you know how it works and when to use it, then do it. Just realize that your learning pace isn’t going to be the same as everyone else’s.

11

Sage Rat’s post made me remember an anecdote that may help you. I majored in ME with a specialization in control systems. My first microprocessor class was taught by one of the worst teachers I ever had. Up until the first exam, I focused on the effects of each instruction on the processor and its registers. Everyone else in the class was memorizing the opcodes. I made the erroneous assumption that the instructor did not expect us to memorize the opcode values because you would never do that in the real world.

Then the first exam came. It consisted of a list of opcodes and we were expected to list the hex values of each. Everyone else did well; I bombed. I bombed so bad that the instructor tried to get me to drop the class. I refused. Since I knew what to expect, I made A’s on the remaining exams and pulled of a D for the course.

The moral of this story is: I’ve worked with microprocessors in control system now for over 17 years and (if I may say so myself), I’m very good at it. I can say with some confidence that there was no point in memorizing those opcodes. It was a pointless exercise mandated by an incompetent (or lazy) teacher. But, sometimes you just have to play the game to get the grade. That’s life.

Just keep plugging.

12

It takes a lot of practice to be capable of quality BS.

Seriously though, you are not stupid Epi. I would WAG that everyone here has felt the same way at one point. Hell, even Einstein had trouble in school for a while.

13

I haven’t had a chance to read through the entire thread yet, but after reading the OP I figured I could comment as I find your description incredibly familiar.

The class you mention in the OP, obviously a computer class, is a perfect analogy for my entire college career up to this point. In high school I was essentially one of the only people in the entire school that knew anything about computers. Most of it came naturally to me… then I got to college and realized that I knew jack shit about computers. I was suddenly surrounded by people who literally spent all of their free time doing nothing but programming and studying computers. I simply could not keep up with them. By the time I got to the high level classes I realized that not only could I not keep up with those around me, but that I simply couldn’t get it anymore. Things no longer came easy (and often didn’t come at all) in the world of computers. But what I found is that I had a lot of skill in other areas that I had never noticed before since I was so wrapped up in my Computer Science degree. In my 400-level criminal justice classes I was one of those people getting straight A’s without trying, I was one of the people who could rattle off concepts that had been touched on months earlier.

I’m still making through my CS degree (I realized my problem far too late in the program to make changing majors a financially viable option) with a lot of hard work, but I no longer look at the other people in my classes and compare myself. I know I can’t measure up to them because I don’t care as much about the topic as they do, and my brain just doesn’t work in a way that facilitates this type of knowledge.

It wasn’t a matter of other people being smarter than me (at least not in all cases), it was a case of my interests and skills were not being in the same place as myself.

14

School intelligence is just one aspect of your entire intelligence capacity. You could be and most likely are a lot more intelligent in other aspects of your life. That said, there are a lot of ways that you can bolster your academics.

Seems from your OP that you are going at it alone. If there are things you just don’t understand, you need to speak with your professor or assistants. You can’t expect to be a l33t haxx0r if you’ve never done it, so you should seek a tutor if you are totally flummoxed.

To memorize commands is an exercise in futility. It’s like learning a language without speaking it. You need to work with them every day or on a project so that more of your brain works on it. More complicated neural patterns will be created and you will LEARN it. If you can’t, it will help you if you can learn memory techniques. They are for everybody, young and old, smart or dumb. It’s great for school and will definitely help you in business life.

If you feel your professor is moving way too fast, it is very likely that other people in your class feel the same way. Sometimes people get down on themselves and feel all alone, I can almost guarantee that you are not alone. Speak to your professor, let him know that things are going over your head and perhaps he will slow down. Remember you are paying for this education, you have a right to be taught properly.

Finally, don’t forget: There are no stupid questions (only stupid people asking the questions, haha.) Don’t be afraid to look stupid. Ask as many questions as it takes for you to understand your subject. It’s that simple. You’re not going to get a second chance, unless you want to take the class over. So you might as well get things straight now.

15

Thanks for all the words of wisdom and support. FWIW, I am probably in category 3 but up towards category 2. Some things come easy (English, etc), but others come slowly, if at all (math). I’ll be 30 this summer, and I didn’t start school until I was 26. I didn’t do well in high school, but mostly because I got involved with the wrong crowd, did drugs, didn’t do homework, etc.

I guess the point about grades is good to know. I had heard that grades don’t matter much, but trying to get an internship is very competitive, and THEY do look at GPA. I guess at this point it doesn’t matter, since I only will be graduating in May 2008.

16

I feel intellectually overwhelmed all the time.

I’ll recommend my personal shell programming cheat book here- Unix Shells by Example. That’s the book I turn to when I need to do something in shell script that I’m not sure how to do. I use cheat sheets all the time for remembering details of shell commands, and so does everyone else I know.

The other thing is, a lot of hacker types aren’t always so good at doing projects for classes the way the professor says they should be done, or at buckling down and doing projects that aren’t cool or interesting, or at getting things done on time. Those things do matter a lot toward your grade, and they do matter when you get a job in IT. In an IT job, sometimes, you will have to do stuff that’s boring, but that has to get done, get done the way the boss or customer wants it done (even if you know your way is better), and get done on time.

Oh, and don’t forget- some teachers are better than others. You might just not have a very good one, or you might not have one whose teaching style meshes well with your learning style. Not all professors are perfect teachers.

Very few professors curve down these days (at least at colleges in the US, outside of hyper-competitive majors like pre-med and pre-law). Just try to learn the material, don’t worry about how you rank by comparison with everyone else.

17

What I found is that playing to your strengths makes the experience much easier. I started off as a computer science major, and just couldn’t do it. I mean, I probably could have done it, if I’d dedicated 20 hours a day to my major. I just wasn’t willing to do it, though.

So I switched to biology (the liberal arts of sciences, if you know what I mean). It involved a lot of memorization, some of which I memorized, some of which I didn’t (and some of which I memorized and forgot five or six times–amino acids anyone?) It was still a lot of work, but I found it more interesting than CS had been, so I stuck with it.

I also picked up a major in English literature. Not only did I love it, but I’d had a spectacular high school course on writing literature essays. The English major was completely painless. I would do my work for it as a “break” from studying biology.

These were all undergraduate courses of study at the same university, in programs with approximately the same prestige. I guess that’s as close as one can get to saying that they were all equally “difficult.” One I loved, one I slogged through, and one I gave up on.

18

I have this as well, and it’s my fault for choosing to study one of my worst subjects (Maths) because I enjoyed it. Note that I’m in the UK, where you spend 100% of time on your subject of choice.

I’m struggling to make it out with a 2:1, so I can take a tangentially related postgrad course.

Study what you’re good at, save what you enjoy for your free time.