A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
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Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#2This 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.
Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#3I'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.
Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#4This 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.
It's also reasonable to sacrifice short term happiness around long term happiness, in some circumstances.
Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#5This 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.
It's also reasonable to sacrifice short term happiness around long term happiness, in some circumstances.
To an extent. One of the memes often repeated at Carnegie Mellon University was (and still is) "Sleep is temporary. GPA is forever."
This causes problems. https://thetartan.org/2012/12/3/forum/mentalhealth
Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#6 I slept pretty consistently each semester, roughly 7–8
hours each day with a few outliers, but no all-nighters.
Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#7Some 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.
Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#8I 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.
Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#9This 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.
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.
Re: A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)
#10I 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
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!