Stephen Casper (https://stephencasper.com/) was giving advice today in how to upskill in research, and suggested doing a “deep dive”.
Deep dive: read 40-50 papers in a specific research area you’re interested in going into (e.g. adversarial examples in deep NNs). Take notes on each paper. You’ll then have comparable knowledge to people working in the area, after which you do a synthesis project at the end where you write something up (could be lit review, could be more original than that).
He said he’d trade any class he’d ever taken for one of these deep dives, and they’re worth doing even if it takes like 4 months.
I think classes are great given they’re targeting something you want to learn, and you’re not uncommonly self-motivated. They add a lot of structure and force engagement (i.e. homework, problem sets) in a way that’s hard to find time / energy for by yourself. You also get a fair amount of guidance and scaffolding information, plus information presented in a pedagogical order! With a lot of variance due to the skill and time investment of the instructor, size of class and quality of the curriculum etc.
But if you DO happen to be very self-driven, know what you want to learn, and if in a research context if you’re the type of person who is capable of generating novel insights without much guidance, then heck yes classes are inefficient. Even if you’re not all of these things, it certainly seems worth trying to see if you can be, since self-learning is so accessible and one learns a lot by being focusedly confused. I like how neatly presented the above deep dives idea is: it feels like it gives me enough structure to have a handle on it and makes it feel unusually feasible to do.
But yeah, for the people who are best at deep dives, I imagine it’s hard for any class to match, even with how high-variance classes can be :).
(How to independent study)
Stephen Casper (https://stephencasper.com/) was giving advice today in how to upskill in research, and suggested doing a “deep dive”.
Deep dive: read 40-50 papers in a specific research area you’re interested in going into (e.g. adversarial examples in deep NNs). Take notes on each paper. You’ll then have comparable knowledge to people working in the area, after which you do a synthesis project at the end where you write something up (could be lit review, could be more original than that).
He said he’d trade any class he’d ever taken for one of these deep dives, and they’re worth doing even if it takes like 4 months.
*cool idea
This sounds like a great idea and aligns with my growing belief that classes are, more often than not, far from the best way to learn.
I think classes are great given they’re targeting something you want to learn, and you’re not uncommonly self-motivated. They add a lot of structure and force engagement (i.e. homework, problem sets) in a way that’s hard to find time / energy for by yourself. You also get a fair amount of guidance and scaffolding information, plus information presented in a pedagogical order! With a lot of variance due to the skill and time investment of the instructor, size of class and quality of the curriculum etc.
But if you DO happen to be very self-driven, know what you want to learn, and if in a research context if you’re the type of person who is capable of generating novel insights without much guidance, then heck yes classes are inefficient. Even if you’re not all of these things, it certainly seems worth trying to see if you can be, since self-learning is so accessible and one learns a lot by being focusedly confused. I like how neatly presented the above deep dives idea is: it feels like it gives me enough structure to have a handle on it and makes it feel unusually feasible to do.
But yeah, for the people who are best at deep dives, I imagine it’s hard for any class to match, even with how high-variance classes can be :).