<p>Hi, i'm a freshman majoring in computer science and I really wanted to get some A's this quarter because I didn't really do well last quarter. I studied my ass off for Math and philosophy midterms... but I ended up with B and B-. I was always like that in high school as well. Whenever I worked really hard, I ended up just getting B's and be depressed. I don't know why but it seems impossible for me to get an A. My roommate, however, doesn't seem like he works that hard and still pulls off with an A. I asked him how he studied, but he told me he is just naturally smart. It's pretty depressing because I'm a computer science major and I know it is going to be harder. I don't know how I'm going to survive. do you guys think there's still a future lying ahead of me? or would it be hard for people like me to survive through college and get decent grades?</p>
<p>There’s no such thing as a person who’s “naturally smart.” That’s a generalization of many things, started by nonchalant conversation and now engraved in pop-culture. There are certain understandings or things that he’s constantly aware of which allow him to study less or get a better performance out of the same amount of studying. A child, with an artistic father who’s involved in the child’s life, will have a good chance of being “talented” in the arts because his father will pass on his appreciation for the arts, giving the child one less enlightening phase he must go through alone. There are so many ways to attack something… if he got an A on a Calculus test and you got a B, and there was a limited time-frame, maybe he focused more on geometric problems while you focused on algebraic problems, and the test ended up having more geometric problems; that could be luck or a good intuition from constant good studying habits in play.</p>
<p>Keep on studying hard. If you’re feeling insecure about your studying habits, try asking students who got an A on the midterm what they think made the difference and allowed them to achieve an A instead of a B.</p>
<p>Yeah… anybody in higher education who calls themselves naturally smart has some sort of problem.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, all you can do is fix any huge flaws right away(if any even exist), and fix the small flaws as you go along. Also, try to adopt some wabi-sabi and understand that some people will excel at some things while you will excel at others.</p>
<p>Yes, you can get through college; of course there’s a future lying ahead of you.</p>
<p>i agree^ people tell me i’m naturally smart, but it’s how i was raised at home. i could write well & count money & read before kindergarten because my mother kept at it everyday… and now i am successful.
and guess what, you’re in college, a B is okay (i may be completely wrong, im not in college so idk). i assume getting As is very hard. at least you arent failing</p>
<p>I disagree. Some people are just naturally smart.</p>
<p>Now I am not saying being smart is 100% all about being born smart. There is how you were raised, your work ethic, how good the schools you attended were when you were younger, etc., but there are some kids that you can just tell they were born with “it.”</p>
<p>Same thing with athleticism. It’s not all about being born with it (work ethic, coaching, etc.) but when you are born with an above normal level of fast twitch muslces, or your arms are disproportionately too long compared to your torso making you a better swimmer (Phelps), it definitely helps.</p>
<p>i guess^^ but still, OP don’t get discouraged it doesn’t make you any less. PS i want to study CS too !</p>
<p>Good habits do not entail naturally smart. Also being/becoming a top swimmer or runner does not entail that is passed on either. Lemarkian theory has been dead over a century. Why people want to revive dead victorian theories about iq and what is or isnt useful is ridiculous. XD</p>
<p>Thanks guys… i’ll continue to work hard :)</p>
<p>depends on how the course is structured. If it is test heavy then usually that works out to the advantage of the smart ones. If it is homework heavy the A’s go the worker bees who are willing to persevere.</p>
<p>As long as you’re naturally hard-working.</p>
<p>I assure you that you have plenty of brain power to get an A in calculus. It’s just a matter of getting a solid foundation.</p>
<p>In my own experience it’s really easy to stay on top of new material once you have made it to the top. A student with a “big picture view” can easily integrate new information into his mental framework - that’s why it looks like some people pull off As without putting in much effort. Other students don’t have this solid foundation and need to work much harder to connect the dots. </p>
<p>Let me ask you this: do you think you get the “big picture” in your classes? Could you explain your math or philosophy classes to me in 5 minutes? For example, if your math class is calculus: What is the idea behind calculus? What sort of problems can you solve with it? What tools do you have, and how do you recognize when to use them? Once you can answer these questions, it shouldn’t take more than a few practice problems to get ready for your exams.</p>
<p>Or take philosophy: What’s the common thread between your readings? Why do philosophers come to different conclusions on the same issue? (How do their assumptions and approaches differ?) Are their arguments sound and valid? (It might help to sketch the arguments out in bullet format if you didn’t do this in class.)</p>
<p>b@r!um,you are absolutely right about calculus!My high school calculus teacher used to say the exact same thing:What tools do you have and do you recognize when to use them?The exact SAME words!And he was like the godfather of Math.</p>
<p>Lol mine says big picture a lot too.</p>
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<p>I’m pretty sure you fundamentally misunderstood what MLDWoody said. He was not proposing Lamarckism - which, by the way, describes how organisms acquire traits and then pass them down to their offspring, i.e. a giraffe stretching its neck to reach the top of a tree will have long-necked offspring. What MLDWoody was saying, however, was perfectly correct. Some people are born with physical, genetic traits that happen to benefit them in some way. Michael Phelps was born with unusually long arms - he didn’t acquire them because he swims a lot, he was literally born with longer arms and that gives him a physical advantage over other people. They can catch up to him with much training and dedication, but it gives him an inherent genetic advantage. That, by the way, is how Darwin’s theory of evolution works. Mutations (such as Phelps’s long arms) can benefit one individual over others, giving them an inherent advantage.</p>
<p>I also disagree with the notion that no one is naturally smart. I think that people’s brains work in different ways; some people just find certain subjects to be naturally easier than others. Some of my classmates, for example, grasp calculus concepts much more intuitively than I do, because that’s just the way that their brains work.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I can do just as well as them on exams, because even though I’m not as naturally adept at math, as long as I work to understand the content I will be at their level and do just as well in the class. It’s a mixture of both. Some people are naturally smart, and it can be frustrating at times. But just because one person has a slight initial advantage doesn’t mean that you cannot do equally well with dedication and hard work. I guess what I’m trying to say is that you don’t need to be “naturally smart” to do well - it can help, but hard work and dedication are just as important.</p>
<p>^thank you</p>
<p>I understand your first paragraph so don’t want to debate that.</p>
<p>If you were to actually read middle school tests from victorian times you would notice they are just as difficult as college exams today. Were they naturally smart because of genetics? No. They were nurtured and trained from a very young age. </p>
<p>Math did not come from god or is some secret special code. It was created by humans as a form of measurement and calculations. I did better in math when I was younger. Why? Because I did it on a daily basis since much of it is learning to figure out what is being asked and recognition from repetition. I eventually grew tired of math and didn’t like it anymore so formed a mental block against it. Yet I’ve learned mental gymnastics to be able to trick my mind into loving even the most boring subjects and excite myself by the challenge. I’ve even psyched myself up, bought a sack of herb, fired up the espresso machine and plowed through entire math books and all the problems in a weekend.</p>
<p>The argument that if you work hard in life you will succeed is such victorian era bs too!</p>
<p>No you don’t have to be. It all has to do with your work ethic. 
I’m reading a book right now called How to be a Straight-A College Student by Cal Newport and this guy is AMAZING. He gives a lot of tips on how to study and how to put more effort in smaller amounts of time. He was also a Computer Science major and he’s doing great now. His book has really helped me, maybe you should read it.</p>
<p>kcirtap is so wrong it hurts. there’s a difference between being intelligent and hard-working/motivated. too bad for everyone who doesn’t think so - IQ is real and it’s pretty much hard-intrinsic.
there are many different areas to be smart in, though. your roommate may just have a forte in whatever classes he’s taking and so understands the material easily. but he could just as well easily fail some other classes.
computer science is tuff. i think computer science is one of the few majors you have to be born to be good at to do. the only people i know who stuck with compsci learned basic/html at like 5 years old, started toying with circuits at 6, and mastered java at like 7. everyone else dropped out.</p>
<p>The Intelligence Quotient was also a ■■■■■■■ child of the victorian era too even though heredity issues were popping up a hundred years prior. Today we have Emotional Quotients done in the business world which are ridiculous.</p>
<p>Natural born computer monkeys is utterly absurd and not even worth debating.</p>
<p>Recent test studies have shown that Atheists and Agnostics knew more about religion than the majority of the most devout religious groups. </p>
<p>Atheists also score higher than Agnostics, who score higher than Liberals who score higher than Conservatives on most modern tests too.</p>
<p>i’ve heard that^^</p>