The biggest challenge of dropping out of school and learning on your own is definitely to be able to maintain a constant rhythm of work and not fall back into laziness. Setting up a timetable is one thing, setting up a realistic timetable you can stick with is another.

Beforehand, whatever exams or path you want to take, you have to do a lot of research first to understand how it works. For instance, before taking the definitive decision to follow the French system instead of the Egyptian, I downloaded the whole curriculum and skimmed quickly through it and searched for exam models… The goal is to know if you can succeed in this system, if you can do it. For me, it meant switching from rote memorization to having to comment on historical events, critically read texts and do math in a much more rigorous way.

So here are 4 things you absolutely need and must be sure to have before thinking of dropping out.

1) A Plan.



A plan should encompass :

- An overestimated measurement of how much work you’ll have to do to finish the curriculum. For example, I counted all the pages in the curriculum, studied every subject a few hours to see the average number of pages I could get done in a hour and then divided the sum of all the pages to get an idea of how much time I was going to need. I then added lots of hours, as a safety measure.

- A timetable to know the weekly amount of work you need to get done. Then, distribute the hours on weekdays. As a general rule, don’t put more than 2 hours of a single subject on a single day, unless you really love it. Also, I would advise not to try to time your work too precisely. So instead of planning something like : “From 2pm to 3pm, math”, you should rather plan : “On Tuesdays, 1 hour of Math and 2 hours of Biology.” Life happens and if you time with hours and minutes you’ll eventually miss something and, depending on your personality, you may be more or less annoyed (which leads to bad things when you work on your own).

- Bi-monthly goals. Something like : “Finish studying Cell Division by the 15th of November.” These will update you and the people in charge of how you’re doing. You’ll know if you need to speed up or slow down. Again, you should keep these realistic.



Don’t overcharge your timetable. You’re a human being remember ? You need time for various entertainments.

2) Resources.

Indeed, you’re learning on your own, with no teacher to explain everything, so you should look for good online resources.

The thing is, you won’t pass Chemistry exams by watching just Crash Course, you need more complete sources of information. Thankfully, you should be able to find the complete curriculum of most educational programs on the internet and this is the best thing to follow. Now, although they’re generally exhaustive, they may not always offer the most clear and intuitive explanations out there, so you need more.

That’s why I generally divide my learning into three parts : Getting the idea - Curriculum info - Additional info

a) Get the idea : this consists in understanding what the general subject is about. This can be a real necessity for complicated math or science.

Sources : I would recommend Crash Course and other YouTube Educational videos, as well as trusted online forums (where you’ll find tons of different explanations of a single topic). Khan Academy also offers excellent videos on pretty much any major subject.

b) Curriculum info : now that you’ve taken a general idea and understand what you’re getting into, it’s time to study it in more depth.

For instance, after understanding how electron orbitals work, you need to learn how to write their configuration.

Sources : Khan Academy is good source for that, as most subjects are carefully explained and exercises are provided to help you improve and test yourself. Khan Academy even allows you to track your progress, see what’s missing in your “Knowledge map” and find what to learn next.

Websites like Coursera.org and Edx offer full courses from the best universities in the world, for free, it would be foolish to miss out on that !

Needless to say, you should also carefully read your official curriculum for any eventual different conventions.

Then, look for exercises, you’ll find plenty of them online. You can consider a specific subject as mastered when you understand all the exercises and tricks in your official curriculum and are able to solve them and explain the subject to someone else. Also, always keep at reach a few exams models from previous years, they are the best way to check your level.

c) Additional info : the curriculum can be a good source of informations, but it’s always better to gain a slightly broader look on the subject by spending a few minutes browsing about it or reading it’s Wikipedia page. You can find really interesting stuff !

Sources : Khan academy’s comment section, Wikipedia, different Stack Exchange forums…

3) Goals and motivation.

You won’t succeed if you don’t have goals or are not motivated. Personally, I left school because I felt like I was wasting too much time and thought I could get much more work done on my own.

The thing is, when you’re studying alone, unless you have teachers or friends who can spend time explaining the material to you, you have to get all the info by yourself. There is no teacher feeding you the information and/or telling you all the tricks and how you solve everything. Not that you can’t find that on the internet (you can find anything on the internet), but this requires you to be more involved in your learning.

So, have goals, find someone to look up to, someone you really admire, a scientist, a writer… From time to time, you may need a motivation boost. You can easily do that, thanks to the internet. Look up motivation on YouTube or Google, you’ll find plenty of boosters. Or you can just read your friends motivational quotes posts on Facebook (probably wrongly accredited to Einstein), but to be honest, Facebook is not a very good place to get motivation.

Finally, it brings us to the fourth important thing you need to survive on your own.

4) Awareness.

When motivation runs short and you don’t feel like working, a good thing to do is to remember how screwed you’ll be if you don’t. This is awareness, knowing what will happen, and it is itself a source of motivation, enough to get you working.

These are four most important things you need to successfully study on your own. Of course, there’s plenty more to talk about, but that’ll be the subject of another post.