When analyzing student reflection assignments from a mandatory research methods course, the authors were struck by the tension between students' own approaches to learning and the challenges, uncertainties, and frustrations accompanying their efforts. Students' ideas about what constitutes learning, how learning is to be done, and how they themselves learn collectively inform their adjustment to the educational setting. Pedagogical research has proposed three broad learning approaches, clustering students into deep, surface, or strategic learners. In practice, however, students often concurrently draw from all three approaches throughout a course, as modeled by a fictional "ideal student" who incorporates intensive interaction with material (deep learning), superficial memorization (surface learning), and tactical time management (strategic learning) into their routine. The authors argue that this is best understood as an act of "bricolage" where students negotiate and apply tactics and strategies to tackle the course material in idiosyncratic ways. Yet, this process remains fraught with tensions that can potentially discourage students from more intensive interaction with the material (deep learning). This article proposes several ways in which educators can use these tensions to constructively help students engage with the difficulties inherent in their own learning processes.