Yeah, so originally, I was doing the thing that I think a lot of students do, which was just taking a look at practice problems, reading through them quickly, and saying, oh, yeah, I could do that, and moving on, even when I couldn’t necessarily do it. So taking the time to solve the problem without looking at the answers, trying to break the problem down into the fundamental pieces that I needed to understand. So say we were analyzing a circuit model of a neuron, the Hodgkin-Huxley model or something like that, taking a look at each part of the equation, figuring out why it had been placed there, what it actually meant in the biological system, covering up pieces of the circuit model and seeing how the interactions between different things would change, actually pulling apart the system instead of just solving the questions that were asked was incredibly useful for me.

And that’s something that the TAs were particularly helpful with. If we had all answered the questions from the problem set already in office hours, but we still wanted more preparation for the exam, they would come up with new questions. And the way they came up with new questions really helped me figure out how to guide my studying.