Undergrads: Terrible study habits?

KamelAkbar
Tue, 11 Dec 2012 20:22:37 +0000

I go to a top engineering school but I’m a few years older than my classmates and haven’t gotten to know many of them. I’m starting to wonder: what are these kids doing in their free time?

I went to a final review session and nobody there knew how to do some of the most basic problems. The professor was visibly disappointed - it was obvious that almost nobody had even looked at the material. He’d try to go over some of the harder problems, but he kept getting questions about basic trivial stuff. For example, some had never seen a formula he used that was part of 25% of all of the homework for the entire semester, not to mention used many times in lecture. It’s like not knowing what the derivative of x is at the end of a semester in calculus. What the heck are these people doing all semester? Normally I wouldn’t worry about it, but I went to a two-hour review session for the class just to have absolutely trivial stuff explained to me because I was practically the only one there who had even glanced at the homework. It’s embarrassing, not to mention disrespectful to the professor, who is known by name by pretty much anyone in his field.

Another thing that baffles me: finals week all-night studying. Just about every night this week there is some sort of organization putting on an all-night studying event. The library is open 24/7. I left at 11pm last night and just about every desk was occupied and some people were just showing up. Why do these people do this to themselves?! If you’re so behind that you would benefit more from staying up all night studying the night before a final instead of getting rest, you are doing something very wrong!

Maybe more disturbing than anything is that I overheard a kid basically telling his friend that he was uncool for studying… and called him a “curve breaker.”