I’m a Master’s engineering student, and most weeks my learning looks like a mix of AI support, note-taking apps, long study sessions that feel almost religious, reading PDFs, and watching recorded lectures for the hardest topics. On paper, it works.
I’ve always had a good memory. For most of my academic life, that was enough. I could read, repeat, do exercises, and things would stick. When exams came, I usually started preparing two or three weeks before, adjusted my pace, and got through them just fine, even while adapting to a system I wasn’t fully familiar with as an international student.
For years, this approach worked. Until it didn’t.
The First Time My System Failed
My first exam in the Master’s program was the first time in four years that I scored an 18.
That number mattered, not because it was terrible, but because it was unfamiliar. It was the first clear signal that what had worked before was no longer enough. Maybe the material was finally hard enough. Maybe the cognitive load was higher. Maybe I just needed to level up.
But the feeling was clear: I was studying a lot, and still not understanding deeply enough.
I wasn’t lazy. I wasn’t unprepared. My system had simply reached its limit.
The Truth About the Tools I Used
The interesting part is that I never relied heavily on fancy tools.
I mostly did things “raw”:
Reading PDFs deeply
Repeating exercises until patterns stuck
Writing notes by hand or in simple apps
Watching lectures again when concepts felt abstract
Later, I added tools like:
Note-taking apps to organize information
AI tools to get quick explanations when I was stuck
Each tool helped with something specific. None helped with the core problem: understanding where my understanding was weak.
I could memorize. I could repeat. But I couldn’t easily see what I didn’t actually get until it was too late.
The Real Problem Wasn’t Studying More
When my usual approach stopped working, my first instinct was to push harder. More hours. More repetition. More content.
That didn’t help.
What finally changed things wasn’t studying more, it was realizing that learning isn’t about consuming material. It’s about making sense of it, stress-testing it, and noticing where it breaks.
At that point, I already knew a bit about AI. Not in a theoretical way, but enough to see that it could do more than generate summaries or explanations. So instead of looking for another tool, I tried something different.
I built myself a tutor.
Not a replacement for studying. Not something to give me answers. Something that worked on my material and forced me to confront what I didn’t understand.
That experiment eventually became what we now call SceneSnap, but at the time, it was just a way to survive harder material.
What I’d Tell Another Student Now
If you’re early in your studies, brute force might work for a while. Memory can carry you far. Discipline helps even more.
But at some point, the difficulty curve changes.
When it does, the problem isn’t that you’re not studying enough. It’s that your tools don’t help you see learning itself. They help you store information, organize it, or repeat it, but not interrogate it.
My advice isn’t to use more tools. It’s to choose tools that help you understand, not just progress.
Because finishing content feels productive. But understanding it is what actually moves the needle.