Sophomore year I hand-copied 80 flashcards from a 217-page PDF and still barely passed. Job-hunting season, I ran the whole thing through AI instead.

The week I was redoing my résumé, I ended up digging through every folder on my old laptop.

I found one called finals stuff. Opened it — nothing but photos. The kind where every page is drowned in three colors of highlighter, mostly yellow.

Second year, spring semester. Organizational Behavior. I basically never showed up.

Three days before the exam I finally opened the professor's slide deck. 217 pages, a PDF, every section title blurring into the next — Section 3, Group Dynamics; Section 4, Group Decision Models; on and on.

My brain just went numb. There was no way I was getting through this course in three days.

My roommate was cramming for something else that week — his stack was even thicker than mine. We sat across from each other at the library, neither of us with the energy to talk, just glancing up at each other every so often and then back down.

I printed it out and went at it with the highlighters. A few lines in, I hit the problem: I wanted to highlight almost every line. It was all new, it all looked like it'd be on the test, no way to tell what mattered from what didn't.

One yellow marker ran dry, I cracked open a fresh one, and by the end the whole thing was a single wash of yellow — which is the same as not having highlighted anything.

Then I started copying out flashcards by hand. Question on the front, answer on the back, palm-sized cards, maybe 80 of them, until three in the morning.

My finger had a red groove pressed into it. I swear I can still almost feel it.

The next day I sat down to drill the stack and realized none of it had gone through my head while I was copying. Pure manual labor. I forgot each card the second I finished writing it, like I'd never made them at all.

I got a 71 on that exam. Just over the line, by a hair.

A month later someone asked me in the dining hall what that group-decision model was called, and I couldn't come up with a single word. Laughed it off with a couple of awkward chuckles.

Three all-nighters, basically for nothing. Looking back, I still wince for the version of me who did that.

This time around, deep in job-hunting season, I was editing my résumé every day until my eyes crossed. One day I dug up those old photos and thought, on a whim — could I run that old PDF again, and see if the hole I dug back then is fillable now?

I still had the actual slide-deck PDF saved from back then. I dragged it straight into the Claude chat box.

First I had it make a mind map. What I typed was roughly this: “You're my study assistant. This PDF is Chapter 3 of my Organizational Behavior course. Make me a mind map of this chapter. Use mermaid mindmap syntax so I can copy it straight out. The center node is the chapter title, then branch out to second- and third-level nodes. Keep only exam-level stuff — the core concepts, definitions, models, and classifications. Leave out the examples and the filler. Use short words and phrases for the nodes, not full sentences. Anytime something has several types, several steps, or several features, list the count and all the names in full. Just do the mind map for now, then stop and wait for me.”

The first one came out a little rough, but the skeleton was right.

It felt too vague, so instead of starting over I just followed up: “Too high-level — expand the Section 2 group-decision part out two more levels, give me more detail.” It opened that branch right up — orientation, discussion, decision — with the hierarchy laid out clearly this time.

If it goes the other way and gets too fragmented, one line — “merge it down to six main branches or fewer, keep only the exam points” — reels it back. Two rounds of back-and-forth and it's dialed in. Don't blow up the whole chat every time you're not happy with something.

I stared at the screen for a bit. My phone was charging next to me, the cable's connection was bad and the screen kept flickering on and off. I left it. Let it flicker.

Next I had it turn the same chapter into flashcards. This is the prompt I saved and ended up reusing over and over.

I told it: “Turn this chapter into Anki flashcards. One card per line, front and back separated by a single Tab character — no commas. The front is one specific question, the back is a short answer with just the key points. Mix up the question types — definitions, compare-and-contrast, and the fill-in-the-key-term kind. Keep answers to the key points only, no essays, short enough to actually memorize. The most important rule: use only what's actually in the PDF. Don't add outside knowledge, don't make anything up, and if a point isn't clearly explained in the PDF, just skip it — don't force it. Give me the 20 most essential cards first; once I've checked them and they're fine, do the rest. Output plain text only — each line is question, one Tab, answer.”

The Tab bit isn't a throwaway note — Tab is the separator Anki expects by default, so text like this saves as a .txt and imports straight in, no conversion step.

And the don't-make-anything-up line has to be nailed down hard. Without it, it'll pad the cards with stuff that sounds right but isn't anywhere in the material — the exam won't test it, and memorizing it just throws you off.

Halfway through typing, some dog downstairs barked twice and then went quiet.

It gave me the first twenty. I spot-checked three or four of them against the old PDF, flipping back to the page to compare the answers.

Most of them lined up. One answer was vague, so I told it “card number such-and-such is off — the PDF actually says… fix it and then keep going,” and it fixed it. For the ones that matched, a single “looks good, finish the rest of this chapter” and it carried on.

Spot-checking, I felt a little sheepish — back then I never once checked whether those 80 cards were even right.

It finished off the remaining few dozen. Then I had it tack on two more columns: “Add two more columns, both Tab-separated. The third column is a tag, formatted like course-name::chapter-3. The fourth is the rough page number in the PDF where this card's content comes from.”

That page-number column turned out to be a lifesaver — whenever I doubted a card while drilling, I could flip straight to that page and check it in three seconds instead of hunting through the whole thing.

I imported it into Anki.

First import, everything got crammed into one column — obviously the separator wasn't set to Tab. I went back to the import screen, switched it to Tab, picked the Basic note type, checked the field mapping so column one went to the front and column two to the back, chose the deck, and re-imported. Clean this time.

I learned my lesson: for a batch of a few hundred, make a tiny file of three or four lines and test-import that first, and only import the whole thing once the separator and fields all check out — saves you from having to bulk-delete a botched import.

I made a deck. On my phone I've got AnkiDroid, logged into the same account as the desktop, so the deck synced over automatically. Waiting in line for food I'd open it and swipe through a couple — I used to just scroll my phone in that time, now at least the scrolling adds up to something.

I looked up when I was done and it hadn't even taken a full afternoon. So fast it hadn't quite registered.

Over the next few days I'd open Anki whenever I had a minute. The cards I knew cold only came back around every several days, while the one I kept botching popped up again right on schedule the next day, like a debt collector.

There was one card I got wrong three days in a row; on the fourth day I finally nailed it, and the moment I tapped correct I actually felt a little proud of myself — over a multiple-choice question.

By the time the deck was pushing 200 cards, Anki was only feeding me 20 new cards a day by default. Felt stingy, so I dug around in the deck settings forever before I found the new-cards-per-day limit and bumped it to 50. That setting isn't on the main screen at all — it's buried in the little gear icon at the bottom-right of the deck, and I tapped the wrong thing a few times before I found it.

Once I had the hang of it, I uploaded the rest of the course's chapters together. I told it: “These PDFs are Chapters 3 through 6. Make flashcards chapter by chapter, same rules as before — Tab-separated, source text only, no making things up, answers as key points. At the start of each chapter, write one line with a hash sign plus the chapter number and title as a marker, so I can split them into decks later. Do 15 to 20 core cards per chapter first; when I say continue, do the rest of that chapter. Focus on one chapter at a time — when you finish a chapter, ask me whether to move to the next one, don't dump everything on me at once.”

Doing it this way let me sign off chapter by chapter, instead of ending up with a pile of wrong cards buried in the hundreds without knowing it.

It actually behaved — it stopped after Chapter 3 to ask me, and only moved on to Chapter 4 once I said continue.

Somewhere in the middle I offhandedly had it make me some practice questions: “Based on this PDF, write ten questions from this chapter most likely to show up on the exam — a mix of short-answer and multiple-choice, each with a reference answer, all from the PDF, nothing beyond it.” Not flashcards, just something to skim before bed.

A few definitions I just kept mixing up — plain Q&A cards weren't cutting it, they kept bleeding into each other — so I asked whether it could make the fill-in-the-blank kind. It told me those are called Cloze cards in Anki and asked me for the rules, so I said: “Take these few definitions I keep confusing and make them into Cloze deletion cards specifically. Wrap the key term to blank out in the {{c1::…}} format — for example, groupthink becomes {{c1::groupthink}}. One card per line, everything else stays the same, still strictly from the PDF text.”

It gave me the blanked-out version, but when I imported it I took a shortcut and left the note type on Basic without switching it. Loaded it up and there were the curly braces sitting on the front of the card, raw, like code that never got parsed. I went back, changed the type to Cloze, re-imported, and the key terms finally turned into actual blanks that only reveal the answer when you tap. Cost me another ten minutes or so, but I wasn't too annoyed — chalk it up to learning where one more button is.

It wasn't all smooth sailing, though.

I gave my mom's old nutrition-class handouts a shot too — some scanned lecture notes — and when I dragged them in, it said it couldn't read any text out of them.

I tried twice — first running them through OCR to make them editable, but the output misread characters in a few spots, the kind of slip where it swaps one near-identical character for another. I also thought about just photographing the pages one by one as images for it to read, but that gets old fast once there are a lot of pages. Couldn't be bothered to pick through it all, so I set that one aside — call it tuition paid.

My mom even asked if I'd finished it. I said almost, almost — hadn't actually opened it again once.

The flashcards weren't all reliable either. One had the wrong year on it — it wasn't among the ones I spot-checked, I just ran into it later during some half-hearted reviewing, and it stopped me for a second.

My roommate saw me fiddling with all this, leaned over, and asked why I didn't just grind one of those ready-made online question banks. I said those make up even more nonsense, didn't feel like getting into it, and he didn't push — just turned back to his game.

Thinking about it later, those question-bank apps really are convenient — the catch is that when they invent something wrong, you have no way of knowing. I just couldn't be bothered to gamble on it.

The hot-food counter at the convenience store downstairs looked like it'd gone up a couple bucks. I only half-glanced at it walking past, but I remember it clearly, no idea why.

I also thought about having Codex batch-run every PDF in the folder in one go, instead of uploading them one at a time. That's the kind that can read files and do the work on its own from the terminal — the task would be something like telling it: “Read every PDF in the source-slides folder, generate Anki flashcards for each one, and output a same-named .txt per PDF into a flashcards folder. Same format — question, one Tab, answer, source text only, no making things up, answers as key points. On the first line of each file, put a hash sign, the course name, a hash sign, and the chapter name as a tag. When it's all done, tell me how many cards each file produced.” It scans the folder itself, works through them one by one, and reports back at the end. But I only had those few files on hand and uploading wasn't slow, so I didn't bother going down that road.

That 71 is never getting changed, that much is true.

On the job-hunt side, the résumé's still in progress and I haven't lined up many interviews, but putting this whole thing together, I was relaxed the entire time — nothing like the wound-up feeling of editing that résumé.

I actually want to try this on my English vocab book too — got a little excited the moment the idea hit — but the résumé is more urgent right now, so I've shelved it. Maybe I'll actually get to it one of these days.

I did keep that old PDF around, though — good practice material.

I'm calling it on the résumé for today — stared at the submit button for ages without clicking, saved a draft, will look again tomorrow.

The deck's built. I named it Organizational Behavior, and I was pretty pleased with myself once it was done — then remembered I only got a 71 in this course back then. Pleased about what, exactly.

The résumé still isn't sorted, but the flashcards I've got figured out — the order's completely backwards, which is pretty on-brand for how my luck's run these past couple years.

These are the few lines I actually say to the AI. I'm pasting the exact wording here — take it, tweak it, whatever. Beats copying flashcards by hand through three all-nighters, which is what I did.

• Mind map: “You're my study assistant. This PDF is Chapter 3 of my Organizational Behavior course. Make me a mind map of this chapter. Use mermaid mindmap syntax so I can copy it straight out. The center node is the chapter title, then branch out to second- and third-level nodes. Keep only exam-level stuff — the core concepts, definitions, models, and classifications; leave out the examples and the filler. Use short words and phrases for the nodes, not full sentences. Anytime something has several types, steps, or features, list the count and all the names in full. Just do the mind map for now, then stop and wait for me.”
• Anki flashcards: “Turn this chapter into Anki flashcards. One card per line, front and back separated by a single Tab character — no commas. The front is one specific question, the back is a short answer with just the key points. Mix up the question types — definitions, compare-and-contrast, and fill-in-the-key-term. Answers as key points only, no essays, short enough to actually memorize. Most important rule: use only what's in the PDF — no outside knowledge, nothing made up, and if a point isn't clearly explained in the PDF, skip it rather than force it. Give me the 20 most essential cards first; once I've checked them, do the rest. Output plain text only — each line is question, one Tab, answer.”
• Adding tags and page numbers: “Add two more columns, both Tab-separated. The third column is a tag, formatted like course-name::chapter-3. The fourth is the rough page number in the PDF where this card's content comes from.”
• Multiple chapters, one at a time: “These PDFs are Chapters 3 through 6. Make flashcards chapter by chapter, same rules as before — Tab-separated, source text only, nothing made up, answers as key points. At the start of each chapter, write one line with a hash sign plus the chapter number and title as a marker, so I can split them into decks later. Do 15 to 20 core cards per chapter first; when I say continue, do the rest of that chapter. One chapter at a time — when you finish a chapter, ask me whether to move on, don't dump everything at once.”
• Bedtime self-quiz: “Based on this PDF, write ten questions from this chapter most likely to show up on the exam — a mix of short-answer and multiple-choice, each with a reference answer, all from the PDF, nothing beyond it.”
• Cloze deletion cards: “Take these few definitions I keep confusing and make them into Cloze deletion cards specifically. Wrap the key term to blank out in the {{c1::…}} format — for example, groupthink becomes {{c1::groupthink}}. One card per line, everything else stays the same, still strictly from the PDF text.”