I've gotten one B in my entire life

I graduated college with a 3.97/4.0 GPA, and graduated highschool with a 4.0 UW GPA. Meaning, in my entire schooling career, I have gotten exclusively A's in every single class I have ever taken, except one.

First, to get these out of the way

You must have gotten an easy degree from an easy school

I studied Computer Engineering with a minor in Computer Science - Intelligence from Georgia Tech.

You must have had no social life and no free time

I was the president of my fraternity, slept 8-10 hours a night, held internships, and worked out 5-6 days a week.

You must have been one of those super geniuses who just didn't have to study

I studied for every exam I've ever taken using the same resources as everyone else. I found concepts difficult to understand, and had to work to understand them. I am by no means a savant.

School is a SCAM, you wasted your time I bet it wasn't even worth it and you regret it

I had a phenomenal time, sacrificed nothing, and ended up landing a high paying role straight out of university that specifically called attention to my high GPA when offering me the job. It was worth it.

Do the boring stuff FIRST

Nothing I say in the later sections will matter if you don't do the boring stuff. If you are routinely skipping class, or are on your phone/computer and not paying attention during it, not submitting assignments on time, etc, then you are shooting yourself in the foot. Stop NOW.

School is a game, Play it

I began "gaming" school in 5th grade. This does not mean I cheated. Instead, I noticed that there was the actual material we were studying and being graded against, and then there was the system that was deciding what material to teach and how to grade against it.

In 5th grade we played a game called "around the world" where we had a snake setup of desks and our teacher would call out two numbers that were being multiplied together. Two students would stand and "compete" to see who could say their product first as all other students sat and waited their turn. The faster student would move to the next desk and the teacher would shout two more numbers. The goal? To make it around the world. To "beat" every student and return all the way to your desk by being the first to say the correct product of numbers against every student in the class.

I am a competitive person, enjoy math, and have some level of my identity wrapped in my intelligence (probably something to do with being the child of an immigrant Electrical Engineering PhD and an Industrial Engineer business owner).

Some students didn't care about this stupid game, but the ones who did would practice their times tables using the assignments given. I on the other hand, would have my parents emulate the game, verbal cues and all. I was practicing for the ACTUAL environment in which I would be playing in, not just the material. I was the only kid who made it around the world, and I did it multiple times in a row.

This sounds small, but most students DON'T DO THIS. They focus too much on the material, and not enough time analyzing how they will actually be expected to show their proficiency of it.

Learn the Teacher, and the Material

My lowest grade of every class, every semester, was consistently the first exam. I hadn't yet learned the teacher, even if had learned the material. Teachers are humans after all. They are subject to habits, laziness, biases, etc. It does not take a rocket scientist to recognize that the format of exam 2 will probably look similar to the format of exam 1. What they chose to include on the exam, what to omit. This is especially important for more "subjective" classes.

Note: I am not suggesting you don't learn the material and only focus on pleasing the teacher. Instead, I am suggesting there are two optimization problems to solve here, material proficiency, and executing that proficiency in the way the teacher has designed it but not said explicitly.

This is one of the main reasons why it is incredibly important to go and pay attention in class, even if you can learn the material on your own. Two professors teaching the exact same material will have VERY different exams. Analyze your exams and assignments. In addition to learning what you got wrong, learn your teacher. What did you spend too much time studying on that they ignored? What did you think wasn't important but actually had a lot of material on the exam? What % of the lecture was spent on those topics vs others?

It then becomes a game of pattern recognition. You don't totally "reset" every semester when you have a new round of teachers. There are strong similarities across teachers and years. Because I started doing this in 5th grade, by the time I got to college I could learn my teachers incredibly quickly (after one exam). After that it, every course became easy.

Not All Resources Are Created Equal

I pitied my fellow students who studied far more than I did and continually got poor grades. The teacher would say the exam "covers material from chapters 1-3" and I would watch as they would start studying and open up to page 1 of the textbook and begin reading.

Note: I almost never opened a textbook in college. The information density and practical application to my courses felt like an incredibly low ROI

They started with one of the worst ways to study in my opinion. I would always work backwards from the closest thing to the real deal as possible. Because I studied computer engineering, most of my exams were problem solving pen-to-paper math and science questions. So, that's exactly what I would do. The absolute GOLD standard would be exams from previous semesters. Many times professors would provide these as materials with SOLUTIONS.

Note: Ask your professors for previous exams

Remember how I said professors are human and therefore subject to laziness? I can't remember a single class I took in which I received practice exams and the actual exam I took looked dramatically different. Now I don't mean they only changed numbers and repeated problems (although that did happen). I mean the actual structure of the exam: the length, type of problems, detail of material, etc.

If I did well on these practice exams, then boom, I was done studying and could focus on a different class. If I didn't have practice exams or was still struggling, I would move to homework problems (similar to exam but different format). If I still wasn't doing well, I would go to office hours or rewatch lectures SPECIFICALLY focused on the ones where they worked through a problem.

You nor I have infinite time, and because I was in a fraternity and taking a lot of classes, I did not want to spend a second more on a class than I had to. So I studied EFFECTIVELY.

Note: I went to school before ChatGPT existed. This is the best tutor on the planet in your pocket at all times. Have it create practice exams in the format of previous ones for you.

Practice Makes Perfect

"Duh," may be your first thought. And yet, if you are still failing or not doing as well as you want you aren't actually internalizing this.

I was a national merit finalist in highschool, meaning I was in the top X % of those who took the PSAT that year. I think I got a 1490/1520. I got a 1550/1600 on the real SAT.

When I took the PSAT my first time for practice as a sophomore in highschool, I got 20/46 reading comprehension questions right. ABYSMAL. You may have thought I was basically illiterate. In reality, the testing style was very foreign to me as I had not done anything like it before.

I began preparing on khan academy. Again, practice problems only. I did this every few days over the next year. By the time I was taking the exam for real in my junior year I rarely got a question wrong. When I did take it for real I got 2 questions wrong on the reading comprehension, and aced the math section.

By that point it was second nature. Because I practiced a little bit, often.

Note: I have never pulled an all nighter, I never felt I had to

It is unfortunate how "cramming" is almost seen as necessary in college, especially in engineering. That is not good practice. The same way you train for months to run a marathon to get your body accustomed to it, instead of waking up after a hang over and deciding to do it, studying should be something you do a little bit every day.

I would chip away at assignments and studying for exams. In most cases weeks before I actually would take them. Not because I was a try hard, actually the opposite. It's because I was lazy and wanted more free time and learned if I did that the total amount of time studying would be far less than if I crammed. 15-30 minutes a day is often times all it would take. Also the material stays with you much better this way. Most STEM courses build on one another. When you cram or pull an all-nighter, even if you can regurgitate the material the next day, rarely will you be able to weeks or months later. If the next exam (or definitely final) covers material from earlier on in the semester, you will have to waste time re-learning that material.

Note: Procrastination is not a genetic trait you are born with. Actually, you probably have eroded your discipline over time due to bad habits. Do not cope yourself into thinking this is just the way you are and you have no control over it

Things Snowball

Inertia is an incredibly powerful force. When you don't learn the fundamentals of algebra, it will make learning trigonometry harder, which will make learning precalculus harder, which will make learning calculus harder, etc. Bad habits compound. If you have a shaky foundation, it will feel as though you are always playing catch up. If this is you, identify those key gaps of understanding and fill them ASAP. I don't care how far back you have to go. Does FOIL make sense to you? What does a derivative REALLY mean?

I always found it funny when other students would complain "they tested us on stuff they didn't teach!" I, not once found that to be true. Instead, there would oftentimes be problems that combined the material into a unique way that truly tested your comprehension and intuition of the material rather than rote memorization. If there are students who still aced the exam, learn what they are doing that you aren't.

Luckily, good habits compound as well. If I'm being honest, college for me was a breeze. Not because the material was easy, it was quite difficult at times, but because I had already "figured out school" and had been implementing my solution for years. I did not graduate a class without having true intuition of the material which meant I had a rock solid base to build the next level of complex topics on top of.

Extras

There are things outside of the classroom that are incredibly important to doing well.

Sleep. If you are not getting good sleep for whatever reason: partying, playing video games, scrolling, studying even, then you are throwing away one of your largest levers for success. Good sleep is paramount towards good memory, the ability to learn new knowledge, and to have discipline to continue studying even when you don't want to.
Exercise. Very similar to sleep. Body + Mind is a real thing, if you don't have a healthy body you won't have a healthy mind. I have worked out consistently since 15 years old. Never once did I consider stopping regardless of how busy a course load or intense final seasons.
Social Life. I enjoyed studying with and around people. Even if they weren't studying for the same exam I was, I found that being in a group setting with people who also cared about school made me study better.

The Elephant In The Room

So how did I get a B? What went wrong?

My one B was my spring of freshman year in college and the course was Intro to Objected Oriented Programming.

What I am about to say may sound like excuses but it is truly how I see what happened.

It was this professor's first semester ever teaching. Any pattern I tried to put her in, would rapidly change. My practice exam strategy? She had none because it was her first semester. She would receive complaints after every exam and would drastically change the format of the next exams from the last, including the final.

This was incredibly frustrating and made it impossible to prepare for compared to any other class I had taken. Compound that with the fact she felt she knew better than everyone, had inexperienced TAs, and did not meet with students outside of class.

I ended this class with an 87. Georgia Tech does not do + or - on grades.
80-89 is a B, 90-100 is an A. That professor was rated so poorly on rate my professor and had other issues that ultimately got her terminated from the school a short two semesters later.

So that's how I got my only B.

My full transcript from University: