How do top students study?

I'll speak on behalf of a close friend of mine, who attended an unknown university from where I am from (Lima, Peru), and got accepted for a fully funded PhD to work with the world-leaders (including Nobel Laureates) at Systems Biology and Computational Biology at Harvard, UC San Francisco and Rockefeller.

I'd like to add, that he beat his competitors at interviewing for Grad School from MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Stanford, Yale, and other top institutions. It's one thing to go to get a PhD at MIT because you did your undergrad at Caltech, but its a completely different story if a kid from a developing country who went to a no-mans-land university beats you at grad school and got to work with a Nobel Laureate. This guy was the deal, and he went from zero to hero.

His success story:

1) Discipline: He had no Facebook during his undergraduate years, and probably only went online for doing homework, assignments or coordinating projects. This reduced his distraction span to zero.

2) Emotional Intelligence: He could control his emotional and sexual impulses. He was very socially intelligent around diverse groups, but he had in mind that having a girlfriend during his undergraduate years would be a major distraction. Both he and I when we were freshman knew that we wanted to go to USA for a PhD, so we were lifelong buddies who always noticed the good and bad things about each other. While I would sometime complain that he didn't go out on weekends (because he never did), he would always complain that I cared too much about appearance, partying and personal marketing. He was not socially handicapped as some people might think a 'nerd' would be, he was actually a very mature person who could talk about anything.

3) Sacrifice: We came from a place where dogs literally walked inside our classroom, and cockroaches would on occasion crawl in our backpack in class. He didn't let any of this get to him. He actually used the poor infrastructure of our engineering building as a motivation, something like "one day I'm going to get out of this hell hole, and do something great for science". He also had a great sense of patriotism.

4) Stellar passion and motivation: The first semester, I found out that he had the highest GPA of the whole class, and I immediately called him by the phone. I didn't understand a thing of what he said because the signal was low. However, the next day he seemed very depressed and told me that his grandfather had passed away. His grandfather was like his father to him and he never got the chance to tell him that he achieved first place in his engineering class. Little did we know, after a couple of weeks we realized not only was he the first in class, he was first in the entire campus achieving the highest GPA (grades in Peru are from 0 to 20, and with no curve). He graduated Summa Cum Laude 2 years ago, and got the highest GPA at our university over the last 30 years. The other person previous to him was Barton Zwiebach, a renowned Peruvian string theorist and Professor at MIT.

5) No pain, no gain: He went overkill sometimes to achieve his goal. I'm talking things like not having lunch to study an extra hour, sleep 4-5 hours a day at least 5 days a week, sleeping on the bus to get extra sleep time, and most dazzling thing of all was that most of the time he didn't go to class. He just stayed studying in the library and was at least 2 or 3 weeks ahead of the professor. Even if he did go to class, he rarely paid attention, he would go over his books to see what methods other authors would teach. He would buy and download at least 5 different books per subject and read them all to learn and to study for the test. He would go over all the proofs and learn them, study them, do them, sometimes reinvent the proofs or see if he could grasp the concept in anticipation of what the book would reveal.

6) Selecting friends: His paradigm for selecting friends (or colleagues) was impressive. He didn't care if it was me (a spoiled rich kid), or the son of a blue-collar family that was a national math Olympiad. He valued people for their ideas and it didn't matter to him where they were from, but where they were going.

7) Becoming a preacher: He was never reluctant on teaching. Whenever anyone would ask him something he would go over the concepts and explain it to him. This was really beneficial for our closed group of friends, as we each learned different concepts and he checked with us or we discussed any doubts we had.

8) Be ambitious: All of his life, he was the best at everything he did. Before enrolling at our engineering school, he was making around $3000 a month by only winning Magic The Gathering Card competitions, and he was Peru's #1 player and Ranked in the top 10 world wide. *Not bad for a 16 year old, at that time.

9) He majored in Robotics Engineering: So yes, he did learn Optimal and Digital Control, Fourier Analysis, Triple integrals, differential equations, etc.. We didn't have computers for our programming tests, they were all done on pen and paper.

10) He was incredibly humble.

He started graduate school at 22

-Arturo Deza,Robot Ophthalmologist

What advice can you give me before starting my UPSC preparation?

 I usually avoid giving advice since generic ‘gyaan’ is not of much use, and I rarely have specific and useful things to say.

However, since you have asked this question, here is what comes to my mind:

1. Remember that the odds of getting into a top Civil Service (IAS/IPS/IFS) are probably 200–300 out of 10 lacs. While we all talk about the big successes, there are 100 times more candidates who don’t make it despite being very capable and working very hard.
1. In my own batch at IIT there was a guy much smarter than me, who was academically brilliant. He never made it even to the interview stage, if I remember correctly.
2. It does not mean that you can’t beat the odds but keep that perspective and know what you are up against.
2. Decide how many years you want to give to the exam. Even though many people have spent 3–5 years, I am reluctant to suggest that one should spend that much time. Give it a year or two, and then give it your best shot.
3. If you are writing the exam, go all out, day and night. It should be a total war, not a skirmish. You should be able to put in 10–12 hrs a day with intense focus, if not more. Though I am talking about number of hours, remember that the quality of effort is more important.
4. Hard work is not enough - you need to know how to prepare the fastest for each topic/subject. In our days at IIT Kanpur, we used to get very good info about which topic to prepare from which book from previous year’s candidates. IITK used to produce many toppers and they had figured out a lot of things over time. It made the preparation very efficient. I suspect it must be much easier now due to organized coaching etc.
5. It is a long exhausting journey. Unless you are personally super-motivated, don’t do it due to social or family pressure. At some point the only thing that will drive you is the fire burning inside you.

I will skip any specific advice on which subject to take or which study material to use. I am sure there are people much better qualified than me to do that.

All I can say is that nothing is easy, but everything is doable. Good luck.

-Rajan Singh

Sleep or Success?

My cousin and his father own a big brand of apparels—they own several showrooms, and mills.

I have never seen both of them wake up before ten am unless they have a flight to catch.

I think it's in their genes to sleep till late.

Instead of sleeping for four hours, they use their mind and manage their business well in six to seven hours a day.

My brother won't wake up at one pm if you don't force him. He cleared Bank PO, SSC (twice), ONGC, and some other papers. He didn't fail in any competitive exam he gave. Also, he was the topper of his school.

I don't know why people form this misconception about sleep and ruin their life.

Sleep is one of the most critical aspects of our life.

Without sleep, there is no strength, no intelligence, no wisdom and no joy.

Sleeplessness causes anxiety, depression, stress, drowsiness, weakness, and slows down your mind.

Sleep makes your body relaxed and improves your productivity.

After a good sleep, you understand things with clarity and faster.

Answering this question-

I completely disagree with the hypothesis that successful people sleep less, leave aside four hours.

(And please don't quote one person out of one million people)

I pray to everyone reading this, don't destroy your sleep in the hope of doing something big in life.

Instead, use the remaining time productively without procrastinating.

-Anubhav Jain

Relationship

 You are going to meet him. You are tired, still the thought of eating dinner with him cheers you up. You can’t wait to share how good the day had been. You also want to discuss about your career plan with him. You know he might be hesistant. It makes you nervous. But you are somewhat confident that you can convince him.

This is the example of a good relationship.

You are going to meet him. You feel scared. You strongly pray that he is in a good, understanding mood and dinner should end on a happy and peaceful note at least this time.

This is the example of a toxic relationship.

A healthy relationship is another source of your happiness. The person forms your support. It might not give you happiness or peace always but it gives you strength to sail through difficult times.

Toxic relationship is the sink for happiness you obtain from other sources. It makes you very weak and vulnerable. Most of your time goes in searching for happiness bubles on the surface of the ocean of bitterness with flimsier hopes.

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So

The best way to check if the relationship works for you or not is to

Monitor how you mind and body feels when you are with your partner.

If you feel nervous, scared, uncomfortable or traumatic, it is high time you need to consider whether you want to go ahead with the relationship or not