How do people attend lectures without going to sleep?!

[Bugz]

Listening to someone talking about a subject and going through slides for 55 mins is so damn boring.

Consequently I have attended 2 out of 12 lectures in the past fortnight. Go me!

Did anyone else do the same as me (i.e. learn the material at home) or did they just endure the boring, suicidal world of lectures....

 

[Jiggs]

Call me crazy but I picked a degree I was interested in to study.

 

[Chilly]

Listening to someone talking about a subject and going through slides for 55 mins is so damn boring.

Consequently I have attended 2 out of 12 lectures in the past fortnight. Go me!

Did anyone else do the same as me (i.e. learn the material at home) or did they just endure the boring, suicidal world of lectures....

I did fuck all at uni too, Id be earning £10k a year more if I hadnt.

You're only there for a couple of years, just get on with it and stop being such a lazy ****.

 

[Bugz]

I enjoy the topic and my results so far have not been suffering.

I just prefer to read and take things in at my own rate, rather than having someone bore me to death with slides but the rest of my course don't seem to agree!

 

[rynnor]

Did anyone else do the same as me (i.e. learn the material at home) or did they just endure the boring, suicidal world of lectures....

Get a mate who takes legible notes then attend 1 week each on rotation if its a really dull one but try to attend most lectures.

 

[rynnor]

Call me crazy but I picked a degree I was interested in to study.

Yeah but is Media Studies in demand?

 

[Billargh]

Try a 3 hour Archaeology lecture when you don't even take the subject.

 

[old.user4556]

Uni seems like such a fucking walk in the park compared to grueling work deadlines that keep you awake at night. What I'd give to have to worry about showing up a lecture at 10am (ZOMG SO EARLY!) or an exam that's mooooooooooonths away. It's not like it sneaks up on you like a black man in the night.

Take it from the guy who wishes he'd done a different degree; having to pay attention to someone for 55 minutes is nothing, it will never be this easy again. Enjoy it whilst it lasts .

 

[Moriath]

friends with good notes that got me through specially the first year .. other years i attended a bit more tho ...

First year i got a 95% attendance only cause friends would sign me in hehe

 

[mooSe_]

I struggle to pay attention to and I rarely if ever take notes. But that doesn't really matter because they always put the lecture slides up on the internet afterwards anyway so I can just print those out for reference/revision purposes. I know that there are some things that they might say that aren't on the slides, but tbh if I was trying to take down notes the whole time then I would be struggling to keep up and I wouldn't listen to what they were saying anyway, so it would just become an exercise of copy down the slides as quickly as I could without listening to the lecturer or even reading what I'm writing (I see lots of other people doing exactly this).

edit: I try to turn up to all my lectures but that's not very difficult since I do 9 hours a week actually in uni maximum

 

[old.Tohtori]

Zzzzzz............huwha? Sorry, even this thread works as a sleeping pill.

 

[Jeros]

Work hard and reap the rewards.

I came to uni to work, not to muck about tbh.

Then again im 25 and love to spit in the faces of people who never said i would make it this far

 

[Sharkith]

depends on the course - if you don't need to attend don't attend. The lectures are just there to tell you the core material and what is the important stuff in your reading. Most people ought to spend up to six or eight times as much time in the library or reading somewhere.

If you want a good degree you need to be aiming for minimum 8 hours a day reading on top of your lectures. So in some cases thats 10 hours work. The secret to a degree is knowing the subject inside out and making sure you are smart about what you learn.

It all depends though on the degree. Some degrees are vocational and so you have a huge range of stuff to learn but do not get a lot of depth. Other degrees like social sciences are actually very in depth and demand you do the reading.

I spent over 10 hours a day studying. Got up at 6 each morning did three hours went to lectures and then worked in the library til 8 at night. I broke up the day by going to the gym and was able to have Thursday nights in the pub and even avoided working on weekends.

A degree is what you make it. The important thing is to recognise that loads of people have them but not many people have good degrees. It is all a matter of individual choice. Thats the beauty of higher education.

 

[dysfunction]

I find writing things down throughout the lecture it helps you to keep more alert and awake during a lecture.

 

[Scouse]

I spent over 10 hours a day studying. Got up at 6 each morning did three hours went to lectures and then worked in the library til 8 at night. I broke up the day by going to the gym and was able to have Thursday nights in the pub and even avoided working on weekends.

Sounds like a recipe for suicide at 40 tbfh.

What Uni did you attend where that was anything other than completely abnormal behaviour?

 

[nath]

I fucking hope you got an epic mega double super first class honours degree with added boobs and custard, Sharkith.

 

[Sharkith]

Yeah lol it seems insane but thats the beauty of University. If you find your subject you have a place where you can go crazy and just study it. Of course I did really well - how could you not? I mean what I lack in intelligence (I lack a lot - I am basically thick) I made up for by working my ass off. I just loved the subject and really didn't want to do anything else. I am still reading it 18 years later.

There are people who go waaay beyond anything I did - one person is reported to have spent almost 10,000 hours on his subject before he left University. He was called Bill Gates. All the world leaders in anything are claimed to have done almost the same number of hours on a very small subject area. In a very short time. Gates I think - correct me if I am wrong, got hold of the specialist computers and just would not leave the labs.

There is no way I would go that mad of course but in the end you make your own degree and you make your own future.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

If you're bored in lectures then taking the notes down will:
a) Keep you active and will stop you from being sleepy
b) Help you learn the material much easier and with less revision.

I would write notes for everything, type them up, then get the lecturer's contents as well and keep them as a backup. This meant that even before it's revision/essay time you've been through the material at least twice. Even if you aren't consciously aware you're picking it up you will be, as your brain has to process it in order to listen to it/write it/copy it.

It worked well for me, although I did go to a shit uni.

 

[Will]

I dream of 55 minute lectures. I have two 3 hour lectures tomorrow. Then again, I don't find then that boring.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

What pissed me off about uni was all the straight out of college pricks that begged the lecturers to give them a 10 minute break an hour in because "they couldn't concentrate anymore."

Good luck in the real fucking word chaps. That break means I have to stay in your shitty company for longer, rather than wrapping up earlier.

 

[Bugz]

Most teenagers & young adults have an attention span of 20-40 minutes.

Having a 10 min breather to re-adjust attention spans etc. is a good idea to me - esp. when your getting spoken to and not getting to say anything yourself.

P.S - correlating attention spans to real world environment is just lol. Do you get lectured 8 hours a day at work non-stop without interruptions? I thought not.

 

[megadave]

Most people around me in lectures seem to be playing/on the internet on their fancy phones. Personally my attendenc is shocklying bad and i need to get it up or it might ruin my grades. When i do attend i usually spare into space or do indeed fall asleep.

I've got a fun task for you to do in your next lecture; work out how much each seminar/lecture is costing you by how much your paying for it all

 

[Talivar]

Not all degrees are easy as some on here seem to imply. Mine is vocational so i have to do all the assignments and lectures AND do a proper job for rest of the week.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

Most teenagers & young adults have an attention span of 20-40 minutes.

Having a 10 min breather to re-adjust attention spans etc. is a good idea to me - esp. when your getting spoken to and not getting to say anything yourself.

P.S - correlating attention spans to real world environment is just lol. Do you get lectured 8 hours a day at work non-stop without interruptions? I thought not.

Who said anything about 8 hours!?! Simply talking about a 2 hour lecture here. Many, many meetings I've been in have gone on for much longer. You can't use the excuse "I need a break, my brain can only concentrate for 20-40 minutes at a time," it doesn't cut it.

I'd suggest if you can't focus for more than an hour you should be working at a McDonald's or something.

 

[Bugz]

Still don't see how you can correlate meetings etc. with lectures.

One is a guy going through slides and talking to 250+ people - the other is a group of people discussing and throwing ideas and objectives at each other and so on.

 

[Wazzerphuk]

Have you ever been in a meeting? I ask since you're a student, ever worked in the real world yet? I got that kind of response from people when I was at uni. The only difference between us was that I had worked for 2 years before going to uni, and they were all straight out of a doss house (college). They're often not like that at all, frequently it's a discussion between two or three main people and you have to listen to it all, for hours.

 

[Jupitus]

I did a straight 4.5 hour technical presentation to 3 staff of a customer today, no breaks, no let up.

 

[Bugz]

I've been in employment for three years; shifting between full time & part time & I'm currently giving any spare time to teaching Maths at a local school so I do have some ideas (which involved a lot of meetings and talks etc. - child safety is hot hot hot).

I accept there will be times when perhaps, as Jup pointed out, an x hour presentation will occur. But not all meetings go like that.

The real problem comes in your correlating people who can't handle lectures not being able to handle the real world. That may relate to your profession; your job; your firm but it certainly is not a microcosm of the whole world.

Besides - I think a substantial difference between lectures & meeting is the material covered etc. Experience, practicality etc. feature in meetings a lot more than lectures (from my experience), which consist of theories & beliefs that you then back up with the experience & practicality of extended research.

Anyway - this is getting out of hand as we're arguing silly little points. I don't think university lectures have any real basis to meetings except in certain cases. And I think in many respects, in this argument, definitions of meetings, presentations, training etc wil all come blurred into one big mess. So nah.

 

[pcg79]

i think what it all really boils down to is:
if you dont think lectures are useful/cant concentrate then dont go.
do something more productive with your time - library time, or whatever.

 

[mooSe_]

or sleeping