I was a junior entering high school, and I arrogantly signed up for 4 AP classes with a full schedule because I thought I could get high grades in all of them—big mistake. Out of all of them, AP Psychology made me the most miserable, but did teach me a lot in terms of life skills. AP Psychology wasn't a hard class in terms of material, but my teacher just couldn't teach the material. All she did was make students present the material and offer useless anecdotes about her son. I learned nothing in the classroom—self-studying was the only way I could actually master the material.

I use the word "master" in a loose sense because I was being tested each week as the curriculum was being rushed for an AP exam that happened to be on May 1. I was strapped for time dealing with countless other tests and papers from my already full schedule and my 3 other AP exams and couldn't understand everything that I was reading. My typical method of studying was (and sometimes still is) writing a study guide that contained the main points of the reading written in my own words and in bullets. I'd then memorize the study guide over the next few days (usually hours, since they weren't done until the night before.)

That was a very bad idea, and although it worked for the first few tests, it quickly began to become a redundant method of learning that only wasted my time. How did I come to this conclusion? Well, as my tests became more frequent, instead of writing in my own words, I kept writing the exact same phrases from the textbook because it would have taken me more time to think of a way that I'd understand it better. My study guides turned out to be so long that I memorized one half of it before I went to sleep and the other half up to the period of the exam. Dividing and conquering seems to be the ideal way, but the word "sleep" doesn't exist in a Stuyvesant High School student's dictionary. That being said, I never pulled all-nighters, but I came close.

How did psychology help me be a better student?

Although I don't intend to pursue a career in professional engineering, this quote by Bill Gates sums up how my class helped me. The more exams I studied for, the better I managed my time for each despite the lofty study guides and eventually got more sleep. As I was a developing teenager, I needed more hours of sleep to just function, much less take an exam. Once I managed to make my studying more efficient, my sleep became a lot better and thus my ability to retain what I tried cramming into my hippocampus the night before.

I learned how to handle pressure better and set deadlines for myself that I'd always follow through with. My grades improved and I began understanding the material over simply regurgitating facts. Although I was still dissatisfied with the class due to the teacher, I think that psychology did in fact teach me about how hard I can make my life if I wanted to as well as how I could deal with it should I choose to go down this path. I think this one class alone prepared me mentally and emotionally for what I might expect in college next year.