There's no replacement for having a good network of friends and mentors to bounce questions and ideas off of. That makes all the difference for me. Another th

There's no replacement for having a good network of friends and mentors to bounce questions and ideas off of. That makes all the difference for me. Another thing is to disregard any statement that starts with "it's simple" or "all you gotta do is" unless that statement is followed by a "here, let me show you...". My main point is that the learning never stops, and you'll benefit from accepting that you are responsible for teaching yourself. Being fully dependent on a TA or professor to shove knowledge into your head is a good formula for hating a class when you start to understand the teacher isn't as good as teaching as you hoped they would be. Lastly, learning is a lot harder if you aren't working on something fun, too. For example, if you're taking a class on databases and it's about as interesting as watching paint dry, maybe doing something more hands on involving databases would be fun. For example, I enjoy doing things like shaving microseconds of the amount of time it takes to query a table, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible helps me understand a whole lot about why that database was designed that way in the first place, which compliments the course material very nicely.