How to link static library to QT creator project properly?

How can I make the most out of my C++ 1001 course? I'm an electrical engineer major, and I will need to be able to use this program language. I've been struggling with using Qt Creator and CMake to make a program. It's my first week in the class, so I might be overreacting.

• I am responding to your answer after taking the course. It seems that the objective of the teacher was to drop as many people as possible from the class, which was packed with students. I presume this only because he kept saying "I'm trying to drop a few cheaters in the classroom." On a positive note, I learned to use Qt Creator with CMake build. Although it seems my program uses a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinGW library. I have downloaded the MinGW libraries, so I'm not crazy.  I confirmed this because after looking up a hack to use "to_string" in Qt, I used a MinGW hack, and it worked. I downloaded the libraries from http://Download.com  I'm not sure how I did it, but it works fantastically, and I can run programs in the terminal from Qt Creator by checking run in terminal from by going to menu Projects ->Run -> and then checked run in terminal. I'm not going to lie that it was very difficult to get this to work, and I don't really remember exactly how I got CMake to cooperate with Qt Creator. Generally, I changed a few things in menu Tool -> Options.

• Answer:

  I had the same problem when I started my first programming class (also in C++).  I couldn't get the "hello world" program to compile, and my first project was a little bit late.  Everyone else in the class (and I actually do mean everyone) had already taken some amount of programming in high school or from somewhere else. But as soon as I grasped syntax and was able to make use of cut-and-paste solutions out of established code, I took off.  I finished the class with the highest exam marks and even wrote extra credit programs making use of things not taught in the class. You're definitely overreacting.  The first little bit is hard because the C++ compiler isn't very forgiving and it takes a while before you learn to appease the compiler.