Advice for self-taught learners entering formal education

seek → learn → get bored → move on

If you're a curious person trying to figure out how everything works, you probably spend a lot of time on the internet looking for that sweet sweet information. This might be in the form of late-night Wikipedia rabbit holes, following online tutorials or watching informative YouTube videos.

If you're in your teens and interested in computing you may have already built your first website, written your first program or learned how to exploit unsafely written database queries. After figuring out how HTML and CSS work, you quickly move on to other topics that come up as you learn. At some point you need to store data, so you learn SQL and dive into databases. You find a new topic and get excited to dig into it. Look how absolutely fabulous this particular thing is! Such a joy to find out how this works! The old topic is tucked in your mental backpack, ready to rely upon when you need it. But rarely do you revisit those old topics, unless there is something particularly new for you in it that you didn't know yet.

Then the cycle repeats: seek → learn → get bored → move on

Waar het hart van vol is loopt de mond van over

It's a Dutch saying, meaning "What you're passionate about, is what you talk about". You may not be good at small talk, but you light up when discussing topics you've explored or are currently fascinated by. You once felt this feeling of discovery and now you just want to share that with people. Here's the good news: this instinct can help you succeed in higher education - if you can channel it.

The trap you might walk into

Going into higher education, the natural choice for you then would be something with computers. You look at the program and see: Programming, Web technology, Networking, Systems administration.

You think to yourself "This will work out well cause I already know quite a bit about these topics" and you'd be half right (the second half) if you're not careful.

See by the time you've already created multiple webapps, programs and homelab setups, you will be given assignments to create a website in HTML and CSS, or make an exercise about functions in C++, or to configure a Samba server in Linux. These are old topics to you, and you now have to revisit them.

You start the C++ assignment and your mind immediately wanders. "How do compilers even work? How do you write a compiler?" Before you know it, you're deep in a lengthy procrastination session that feels completely productive because you're learning. After all, the whole point of higher education is to learn new stuff right?

Oh yeah, the assignment! You do the bare minimum cause you're pressed for time and low on motivation and you get a low grade. Big surprise. To no-one. Not only did you lose focus on the assignment, but all that context switching made it even harder to concentrate. The point wasn't you learning how compilers work, the point was you being able to show you understand function calling and pass-by-value and pass-by-reference and to demonstrate excellence on THAT particular topic. You've fallen into the cycle again - and breaking out of it is crucial for your success.

How to break the cycle

Recall how you get excited to explain cool stuff to people who show interest? Yeah. You need to become the teacher. Pretend your teacher doesn't know about function calling in C++, or has no idea about file servers and how to configure them. Pretend your teacher is asking YOU for help: "Hey I'm trying to do this and since you know quite a bit about this, could you help me?".

Now write your report or assignment as if it’s a tutorial for that person. Explain each step clearly, include the “why” not just the “what”, and imagine you’re trying to get them to feel the same excitement you did when you first learned it.

Studies have shown that expecting to teach a subject improves how well you learn and remember it - it's called the "protégé effect" (Fiorella & Mayer, 2013). By writing your work as if you're teaching it, you're tricking your brain into going deeper and organising your knowledge better.

Also, keep the assignment sheet in front of you and go through each requirement one by one as you work. Even if you already know the topic, this makes sure you’re proving it in the way the course is actually grading you.

Is this just you?

No. Research on student engagement shows that academic boredom is widespread, with surveys finding that 40-70% of students report frequent boredom in class (Tze, Daniels, & Klassen, 2016). Autodidacts who've already explored a subject are especially likely to feel this way. The trick is not to kill your curiosity, but to put it on a short leash when it's time to show mastery.