I actually did this as an undergrad, despite barely being able to afford school. I left school for a bit, so I could figure out how to actually pay for it. After getting that worked out, I came back and realized I'd forgotten way more math than I had anticipated. Between my CS courses and math I was getting overwhelmed with the sheer breadth of information I needed to be have mastered to comfortably follow along. I took a one semester long remedial class that served as a refresher to all high school level math.
After that I worked through my classes with a tutors help. Everything up to and including linear algebra and numerical analysis with the help of a extremely kind PhD student named Adnan. He had the patience of a saint and ended up becoming a very good friend.
The most valuable part of having someone like this available for an hour or two every week is that it increases your knowledge or understanding/minute rate dramatically. It's like having Google or Khan academy on steroids. Someone that did everything already and knows exactly what page of a text book to look lat to help you understand, but they don't even need the textbook, because they know how to explain the concept you're having trouble with.
To this day I work as one of many data lscientists on a team where we all have fairly diverse backgrounds. In fact I'm the only person that is only CS and does not have a graduate degree. I have a teammate that did her undergrad and Masters in mathematics and if I'm having a hard time with something math heavy after some googling, the first thing I do is ask her for a quick explainer. She does the same with me for CS or programming issues as well and I help her with informal code reviews.
I know this will seem like basic teamwork to a lot of folks, but far too often I see people in our industry exert huge amounts of effort to understand a difficult concept that likely someone they're sitting a few feet away from has a very good understanding of and would be happy to help them with, so they're not banging their head against the wall for hours. I had to have a similar conversation with my intern a couple years ago. She was spending hours doing pen on paper math to understand Kalman filters. Things went much more quickly after I talked to her about my process of working with my colleagues and asking for help when I didn't understand something.
TL;DR Ask for help sooner rather than later. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
After that I worked through my classes with a tutors help. Everything up to and including linear algebra and numerical analysis with the help of a extremely kind PhD student named Adnan. He had the patience of a saint and ended up becoming a very good friend.
The most valuable part of having someone like this available for an hour or two every week is that it increases your knowledge or understanding/minute rate dramatically. It's like having Google or Khan academy on steroids. Someone that did everything already and knows exactly what page of a text book to look lat to help you understand, but they don't even need the textbook, because they know how to explain the concept you're having trouble with.
To this day I work as one of many data lscientists on a team where we all have fairly diverse backgrounds. In fact I'm the only person that is only CS and does not have a graduate degree. I have a teammate that did her undergrad and Masters in mathematics and if I'm having a hard time with something math heavy after some googling, the first thing I do is ask her for a quick explainer. She does the same with me for CS or programming issues as well and I help her with informal code reviews.
I know this will seem like basic teamwork to a lot of folks, but far too often I see people in our industry exert huge amounts of effort to understand a difficult concept that likely someone they're sitting a few feet away from has a very good understanding of and would be happy to help them with, so they're not banging their head against the wall for hours. I had to have a similar conversation with my intern a couple years ago. She was spending hours doing pen on paper math to understand Kalman filters. Things went much more quickly after I talked to her about my process of working with my colleagues and asking for help when I didn't understand something.
TL;DR Ask for help sooner rather than later. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.