How do YOU spend your time in lectures?
Written By Sreeja Roy
I remember one lecture, an incredibly boring one, where the lecturer seemed to be falling asleep at their own slides, looking around and wondering what the people around me were doing. I had exhausted my supply of entertainment by completing the New York Times (NYT) games in record speed and my pictionary playing partner was nowhere to be found. I was right at the front (not ideal for a nap) and at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon I had given up any hope of taking coherent notes. A quick glance around the lecture theatre told me I wasn’t the only one who had abandoned their academic pursuits in favour of a much easier way to pass the time. My curious (some would say nosy) brain had to know how everyone spent their time in lectures. Hence, this questionnaire was born.
If you ever wanted to know about how people spend their time in lectures or wanted some ideas on how to kill time, this article is for you. The students of UCLMS Years One to Three have provided a range of academic and very non-academic activities for you to choose from.
Freshers
Starting off strong with the freshers, whose second most frequent activity - runner up to the admirable ‘take notes’ - is (unoriginally) scrolling. However, they did provide some fun game suggestions: Pixel Gun 3D, Geometry Dash, chess, Call of Duty, Plague inc., Subway Surfers, Block Blast, Tomb Raider and two mentions of “the coffee game” which I am guessing is Good Coffee, Great Coffee. If I am completely wrong, come find me and we can talk about how to give the full names of games in questionnaires so you aren’t misunderstood.
Alongside a simple check-box question about the activities the people of RUMS do, I forced them to write a sentence about what the most memorable event was in a lecture. Sometimes the best entertainment comes from external sources. For this category the Freshers have reported (apart from all the great lectures, obviously) the dinosaur breaking into LT1 and dropping off two donuts for the lecturer. [The dinosaur was a medical student in a costume raising money for charity, lest you thought it was a Jurassic Park like situation]. The MDs’ performance at the beginning of the year was a close second, showing that the masses love whimsy and disruption. One special mention is for a student whose most memorable event was “Learning that [their] lecturer was a Twitter warrior”. Take note professors: if you want your students to pay attention to you, drop your Twitter handles.
Year 2
Moving on to Year Two whose spread differs slightly with ‘games’ as a whole coming in second after note-taking, followed closely by ‘reading/Anki related activities’. Something I found out while doing this questionnaire is how many people use the lecturer’s live performance as their personal study music while they revise other topics. I strive to reach such levels of multitasking. Some game suggestions that stood out to me from this year group are: Clash Royale, Archery, Roblox, LinkedIn games and ‘lecturer bingo’. The last one I find fascinating, and I hope the person who submitted it reads this article and can tell us how to play it. Some ‘other’ responses that were submitted were reading emails and online shopping. This is how the Vinted warriors get the best deals: they don’t stop the haggle for medical school.
Year 3
Now for the final year group, the reason I started this whole questionnaire: Year Three. Similar to the Year Twos we’ve got ‘games’ coming in second to ‘taking notes’ which, admittedly, I am proud of my cohort for. Some fun game suggestions were: Pictionary, Football Manager, Cupcake 2048, Google Snake Game and Solitaire. The most fascinating reply and most self-explanatory game (in my opinion) was the ‘try not to tickle each other's feet challenge’. If anyone else tries it, they should let me know how it goes. The most memorable event for the majority was when “the guy in the suit” shouted at the “talking people”, which was incredibly special but did happen back in Year One. Evidently everything went downhill from there.
So what did I learn from this questionnaire? Other people also don’t pay attention to the lecture. This was all an elaborate scheme to make myself feel better for not taking notes, so thank you to everyone who participated in soothing my guilty conscience. I would love to be able to scientifically compare the numbers with error bars and statistical values, but unfortunately my data taking was unreliable and there are too many confounding factors to take these statements as fact. Hopefully you guys enjoyed seeing the results and have taken many great ideas away from this. My next steps would be to get funding from the DDS (Doctor as Data Scientist) department and launch a large-scale investigation on how people spend time in lectures.
Read the rest of the edition here
