I have average intelligence and maintained a 3.5 at a top bioengineering school. I barely went to lectures, and just made sure to stay on top of the material through online resources (we have literally everything ever available to us). Id say not being a dumbass is the name of the game.
It always surprises me when I interview new graduates now and they can’t explain any of their projects or pass a basic software proficiency test that most intro classes should cover (I usually ask them to write code to reverse complement a DNA sequence… just swap out some letters and reverse a string, I do include the rules in the prompt). I think cheating is really rampant in software students.
I used to put my socks on these as a kid cause it’d warm them up. I ended up forgetting them one day and there was a fucking roaring fire coming out of the top of the bowl within minutes.