This is me elaborating on my personal takeaways on the vast ocean of How-To's for becoming an academic weapon, and how to actually try and become one.
Life hasn't always been about studying, but rather "learning". It's a continuous process that fundamentally builds what we are today. As GenAI progresses even further, we are getting more detached with the basic principles of how to "learn" as a whole, all the while forgetting how to stop procrastination and the minimal-effort mindset from engulfing us fully.
I've been no stranger to this as well. I was one of the developers who tested GitHub Copilot back when it was based on the GPT-3 model. It was good times; It was almost 4 years ago, when I was testing my latest Discord bot's capabilities. I kept adding new features everyday, when suddenly the new chat completion felt like a new "boom" in the tech industry. Well, indeed it was one. The current reasoning models which I'm using on my IDE (namely GPT 4o for automating mundane tasks and o4 for tasks which involve better reasoning) have gotten significantly stronger. The Chinese counterpart DeepSeek R1 has also shown the west that it's not alone in terms of perceptrons.
However, it's changing one fundamental trait of us humans that has crossed thousands of years of evolution and has never been intercepted before up to such a magnitude.
It's that same "learning".
I've encountered a nice video resource on YouTube regarding this topic when it comes to programming. You can see it here:
"Don't ask AI to write your code"
Anyways, looking to all the AI slop that has been going around GitHub, Google Scholar and the whole intellectual community as a whole nowadays, I'd rather skip on talking about this topic than get backlashed by a lot of other individuals who have already made themselves dependant on the tech which they don't even own.
Let's return to the topic.
"Learning".
The core process of human evolution that doesn't run on foreground everytime, but always, and I mean always, has a background thread for it, running at all times.
... and by our, I'd like to mention the Asian ecosystem of education first, since I live in Bangladesh. People who've really succeeded here, or who ARE eventually about to succeed, have this common mindset amongst them when it comes to choosing their occupation:
Recognize the pattern here?
I hope you do.
Well, the pattern might not seem as much from a birds eye view but when you look into it, you might see a vicious cycle of basically "training the students to be imitators or telling them they're doomed" type of sorcery. Students aren't taught anything on this country to succeed for their careers during their first 20 years of their life. And by the time they cross 20, they're eventually overwhelmed by the utter realization that the knowledge they've been chasing all along doesn't match their core principles in the workforce.
Now don't get me wrong, I "do" support studying for academics, but the way students usually approach these is overwritten by either their parents or the social pressure they're surrounded with.
Oh, I also mentioned ed-tech, yeah...
I remember almost a month ago, I was searching for content related to my syllabus background since I was lacking a proper guideline to finish it. I'm still a little off-course from finishing it with precision since I've been juggling around tasks without prioritizing my study. This might sound counterintuitive but, this happens to almost all the students who try to finish their task at hand here.
A month ago, I was absolutely overthrown by motivational content by countless content creators from all around Bangladesh who are trying their best to promote a product tailored to our batch.
Countless instructors... telling students how they've been wrong about their decisions which they haven't been in complete control of... in the very first seconds of their videos...
Now hopefully you get the cruel pattern I mentioned earlier.
The effect induced two other bodily reactions to the overflow of content over a student who had gone throw them, namely:
Our brains run their reward system on a chemical called dopamine. It's the fundamental law of nature that we receive something in return for the hard work we do. However, speaking from experience, this dopamine has become as common as a vitamin supplement in today's world.
Students find studying hard. It's the reality.
They don't find the instant gratification in it that they get from scrolling or binge-watching a series for an entire night. This neglegancy adds up over time, and harshly bursts out during the peak times when a student, theoretically, should study.
And its not just dopamine at play. Cortisol, the stress hormone, also acts as a response to the fancy eating habits a student might have after they copy some random YouTuber's "Study with Me" sessions watching they drink cappuccino during the midnight.
It's more about the "how".
The first course of action for a student I see as a student myself, is to cut off ed-tech content which spirals you into imposter syndrome. You might think that you're not as far into your curriculum as you previously might've estimated, but if you jot down the topics which you're extremely skilled at, you'll see that the list you once thought was large, became much smaller in size.
Comparison is the pillar of failure.
If you compare your learning strategies to someone who might be faster (assuming they've discovered their own properly), you could be dumbfounded, and I'm just saying "could be" because I'm trying to be generous with my words in this blog entry.
Stop whatever content you're consuming thinking it'll get you anywhere close to finishing your syllabus, and you're already 50% done rebooting your conscience out of dystopian depression.
Now, don't make a plan yet.
Brains are good at executing plans but there's one thing I've found out about planning which, might as well be, counterintuitive.
You see, I've mentioned earlier that brains rely on dopamine as our mind's primary reward system. But, it doesn't necessarily generate dopamine when a task is completed. It is generated whenever your brain "thinks" that a task is done. If you let it think that way, you might as well be gatekeeped into that whole spiral of doom anyway.
Don't let your brain think the task at hand has been finished. If you write down your plan in a thorough manner, your brain does succeed in the first round of winning against procrastination, but if you look at it in the long term, the dopamine induced from that same success might haunt you in terms of actually completing whatever you've written.
So, micro-manage your plans in your mind. If you really, really wanna plan, write your end goal and put it in front of your table, or probably put it as your desktop wallpaper, to constantly remind you of the plans that you're micro-managing.
I refuse to believe if you, as a person, tell me that you haven't heard of pomodoro. It's basically everywhere, but most students use it in a way that they lose motivation to continue it any further afterwards. Take me for example:
I had used the common pomodoro technique of "40:10" (40 minutes studying, 10 minutes break) method during my secondary board exam back in 2023. Yeah, 2023...
That was two years ago...
The last time I used the most common pomodoro technique spread across the entire internet.
Now at the time of me writing this blog, my next and final board exam is supposedly 1 month and 2 days away from kicking off. I still haven't covered a lot of the study materials I'm supposed to complete. However, as any other person would do, I thought of researching more about how to study by searching across the internet. I wasn't really disappointed.
Our brains rely heavily on a cycle called the "Circadian Rhythm" for functioning. Based on it, some researchers have proven that our minds can't really stay focused on one thing for more than 90 minutes (reaching its absolute limit at 120 minutes). Students who think they could pull off a whole 12 hour study session after not studying for months will be dumbfounded if they want to start now.
Yeah, it is technically possible, but with some strategy. Again, following my previous point, don't create a routine, yet! The dopamine would reset everything you've read so far in this blog with instant gratification you're not really supposed to get right now.
Okay so, the strategy...
First of all, we'll have to start off by reordering "one" study session, adding in a pinch of pomodoro and another pinch of optimizing the Circadian Rhythm into it:
For each study sessions, you would:
For taking the break, I'd say, limit your scopes. Don't rush back into scrolling aimlessly after you've finally managed to trick your brain to study. Try, instead, taking a walk. Or, probably socialize. Go touch some grass.
Once the fifteen minutes are over, you must be back on the table. You can even think about what you're going to study within the break time. And when you're indeed back on the table, repeat the same strategy we discussed for the first session.
If you sleep for 7 hours a day, and even take longer, more mindful breaks after bigger chunks of these sessions, if you manage to spread out the sessions evenly, you'll actually get more than 10 hours of studying per day. I had tried this method for a couple of consecutive days and it got me 6 hours to 8 hours in average per day (procrastination added).
Okay, procrastination is not really as bad as most people (by people I mean motivational influencers) state. It is a natural tendency of your brain to reboot itself after long periods of work or learning. It's inevitable, and no matter how hard you try to avoid it by consuming more and more motivational content every now and then, it's still going to stay. It isn't going anywhere.
Why not just use it with strategy?
During your procrastination hours, you may as well avoid your phone. Instead, try to make a classic hobby which doesn't involve instant rewards:
I've stated my personal favorite ones here, but it could be anything for you which doesn't involve putting yourself into the spiral of doom again.
Most students love to avoid their concurrent task by providing excuses of their surrounding environment, such as:
Try to ignore these. There will be situations when it's absolutely mandatory to follow outside instructions while disobeying your own routine, but other than that, try to stay immovable like a Rust variable (if you know the reference, you know).
A point such as this one doesn't require much elaboration so moving on...
You've already seen that I haven't really named the sections in this blog entry like most other typical articles. I've found that, using these headlines, most people skip over the core understanding a writer wants to share through their writings. They just scroll through the entire page scanning for headlines and quit. Unironically (or ironically), this is one of the excuses students take to skim through the material they're supposed to study without proper evaluation in their mind.
I want you to thoroughly read this entry. Not for my good, but for yours; This page doesn't have any monetization to benefit me.
The title of this entry is on how to become an academic weapon. You'll see at least a hundred of YouTube videos sugarcoated with the same, unmodified title. If you're unconscious about the time you're spending over YouTube watching these same videos repeatedly, it's not doing you any better than binge-watching shows till 3AM.
So, to be an academic weapon, right?
You must already think you are one. No strings attached.
Some of the things I shared in this blog are totally out of my own experience dealing with procrastination and productivity issues over the years. But, I think I've finally striked a balance between guilt-free laziness and exhaustion-free work.
I hope this article may turn into a good resource for you :3
Well, not the article, really, but you, yourself.