
A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016) - dirtyaura
https://medium.com/@tiffanyqi/a-college-students-individual-analysis-of-productivity-of-four-years-e51e5ec3af6
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sabujp

        I slept pretty consistently each semester, roughly 7–8
        hours each day with a few outliers, but no all-nighters.
    

this is what good planning gets you

~~~
SBCRec
This. I use to be a champion of all nighters and cramming, until I got serious
with my time management and maintained a healthy sleeping pattern.

1st-3rd year with all nighters -> average low 80s average. 4th year with maybe
1-2 all nighters -> low 90s average.

Of course other factors contribute and as she mentions in the article by your
final year you know how to get high marks, but I see the error of my ways not
following good sleeping patterns for the earlier years of my undergrad, bloody
youthful exuberance!

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luckyt
This is a really nice analysis, but I'm wondering if GPA is the right metric
to optimize for. It's good to have a high GPA, but is it worth it to structure
your leisure, sleep, and dating patterns around it? I'm doing something
similar, but I record at the end of the day how happy I am, and analyze how
different things affect my happiness.

~~~
closeparen
Education at this level is a "who can survive the most unpleasantness"
competition. High school students work their asses off to get into highly
selective colleges. Highly selective college students work their assess off to
get into highly selective grad schools or employers (investment banking,
consulting, prestigious tech companies). Students of highly selective grad
schools work their asses off to get into the vanishingly few secure, living-
wage jobs in their fields.

At each stage, the purpose is the same - to prove that you are more deserving
than your peers of a seat in the next stage, because each stage has fewer
seats than the last.

If you value your present well-being over advancement (and therefore future
well-being), don't put yourself in a competitive educational environment with
the goal of "winning" (i.e. high GPA). If you have certain career tracks in
mind, sleep deprivation, poor mental health, and low quality of life in the
short and medium terms are table stakes.

I enjoyed my time at such a place once I had a good relationship with a tech
company (now my employer) and no grad school ambitions. My friends headed for
the sciences could not have optimized for their present happiness without
giving up their dreams.

~~~
theobold
What a shitty system

~~~
closeparen
That's meritocracy for you. We have to select people for scarce and highly
desirable positions somehow; "willing to work the hardest" isn't the _worst_
strategy that's been tried.

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jo909
I'm sure almost everybody here is already aware of it, but since it is so
important:

Correlation does not imply causation

The author is doing a good job not mixing them up, and just uses common sense
for her reasoning.

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stil
I think this record of academic performance speaks more about the individual
rather than the "usual suspect" correlations. For instance, she clearly is the
type of student that meets a challenge head on (by coming back from a poor
midterm) - which would negate the correlation between time spent studying and
GPA (more time spent to just recover a grade). She also did not say whether
worst test scores are dropped and how that was treated. She has good habits
and sleeps as much as she should, but what about exercise? There's a lot of
research that supports the claim that cardio activity improves brain function.
It's too bad she didn't pay more attention to this. Still, a very determined 4
year analysis.

~~~
tiffanyqi
Hi -- author here! Thanks for commenting and sharing your thoughts!

In terms of test scores, there definitely were a couple of classes in which my
tests were dropped--but only 1-2 of them. I embarrassingly exercised 27.5
hours in college...not something I'm proud of, and I decided not to include it
in this analysis since the numbers weren't high enough and I didn't do this as
consistently enough to warrant any sort of meaningful correlation. I did live
in Berkeley and it was pretty hilly so I definitely found ways to keep myself
active! I also did track my weight and used a Fitbit for two semesters, so
perhaps I could add something about that in the future :)

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peter303
Some time ago there was a guy who kept a diary recording each 15 minute chunk
of his life for several decades. I dont know if he or others went back and
tabulated this information.

~~~
WalterBright
I'd hate to have tabulated the amount of my life I wasted in tabulating.

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barry-cotter
Can someone with vouching powers vouch for the author, tiffany qi, who has
been shadowbanned?

~~~
pluma
Seems like the ban was overruled.

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gravypod
I think a but source of this issue is the house amount of unrelated classes I
must take in college. I'm very lazy when it comes to things I have absolutely
no interest in. I think I can provide some useful insight.

Right now I'm at New Jersey Institute of Technology. I am in the Ying Wu
college of computing science. After this semester (at the start of the third
year) I will have no more computer science classes I need to take for my
degree. I personally believe I am very competent with the skills required to
be a computer scientist in the real world (Software engineering, system
design, managing, etc).

The remaining classes I have are as follows.

    
    
       * "Software Architecture" where you don't actually need to write software. I think you just learn about PHP or something from what a friend told me. (One of my professors said you didn't need to write any code for the class)
    
       * Proofs where you just learn discrete math. 
       * Calc 1, 2, Linear, Diff EQ (in that order)
       * Physics 1 & 2
       * ~ 2 hum classes 
       * 2 PE classes 
       * 4 Non-CS courses in lower level (easier like EE100) and upper level (harder EE300) course numbers 
    

The only CS related thing I need to do is my senior project which is just to
write some software and hand it in with a write up. This will be very easy for
me. I'm not going to name names but one of my friends who did this submitted
something that I was able to write in a weekend. Theirs was less polished and
broke during the presentation (mine is still running). Their write up was good
though. So they passed and got their degree.

I've basically got a laundry list of projects on my github page of projects
I've done that would work as a senior project (let alone what I've been
writing for the research group I'm working for).

I've also TA'd for a CS class here. Both times my class was in the top 10%
scoring similarly to the honors sections. Not all my work but I like to think
my explanations of the topics helped.

So why am I still here? Why do I need those check boxes? I'm basically stuck
doing BS that I suck at because they want me to be "well rounded". I don't
think that's 1) a reasonable goal to expect, 2) what college is for, 3) what
im paying for.

The reason I have to take calc 1 and physics 1 still is because I failed my
first year. Only those too classes. Even with 2 Fs on my transcript my CS
classes kept my GPA at a ~2.9. Funnily enough I'm working in the physics
department writing software for physics PhDs and talking with them on a
reasonable level of understanding about their research even though I couldn't
pass Physics 1. I'm also the treasurer for the Ham radio club (I'm KD2JAO and
I'll be at Dayton or wherever this next hamfest). I have a pretty ok
understanding of propegation and radio and I'm currently studying for my
general. But I couldn't pass Physics 1.

Why? I think a large amount of reasons.

The first and most prominent one is I don't care about what was taught. It was
all projectile motion which is asinine and boring.

Second was I have a life and other classes I cared about that were far more
interested. I could either do well in my classes I liked or do meh in all my
classes. I also had a lot of family troubles (death, divorce, moving, etc)

The final is more technical and out of scope for this conversation.

If we removed unimportant classes from the curriculum we wouldn't have this "I
never get to sleep BS" and the times you would loose sleep would be because
you love what you're working on. (I stayed awake in bed staring at my cieling
some nights thinking of better solutions to my CS programming assignments
assignment)

~~~
douche
The reason I have a history degree and not a CS degree is because the asinine
tie-ins with the mathematics department made it nearly impossible to get back
on track if you did not take calculus 1 your freshman fall. I still fume,
thinking about the data structures and algorithms clasd I suffered through,
where we wrote reams of proofs, but not a line of executable code.

~~~
gravypod
I wish you could hear my applaus. That's how I feel now. Luckily for me the
school I go to is so disorganized no classes in the CS department have pre-
reqs for the classes you actually need to understand to pass them.

I was able to come in, sign in to all CS classes all 3 semesters, ace all of
them, and now I've got my thumb up where the sun dont shine waiting until I
get my degree.

