12 ms·

A college student’s individual analysis of productivity of four years (2016)

86 points by dirtyaura 10y ago

luckyt 10y ago
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.
- CardenB 10y ago
  It's also reasonable to sacrifice short term happiness around long term happiness, in some circumstances.
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    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 https://thetartan.org/2012/12/3/forum/mentalhealth
- closeparen 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    What a shitty system
    - closeparen 10y ago
      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.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - treestompz 10y ago
    > Education at this level is a "who can survive the most unpleasantness" competition. This is brilliant. It sums up my feelings about education so succinctly. I'm stealing this.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    > High school students work their asses off to get into highly selective colleges. Not necessarily true. I never worked hard at anything in high school, and was accepted by several ivy league colleges. My experience was not unusual. I did not work all that hard in college, but was accepted at Stanford for grad school. (I averaged maybe 30-40hrs a week on schoolwork in college, leaving plenty of time for other activities.) There were some who did work their asses off, but they were in the minority and I felt rather sorry for them. Either they were working inefficiently, or just weren't cut out for that career path. It'd be like me trying to be a pro athlete. I could work my ass off, and never get anywhere, as I have worse than no aptitude for it. Some also did no perceptible work and got straight As. I was a bit envious of them :-) they were amazing people.
  - douche 10y ago
    One of the best times in my life was when I was in such a college environment, but instead of going through the grad school and corporate recruiting gauntlet, I opted out and planned on joining the military. I ended up in a software job I found on Craigslist instead, but not giving a fuck is still one of my best decisions.
- tiffanyqi 10y ago
  Author here -- thanks for the comment! I also would agree that GPA isn't necessarily the right metric here. The reason I chose all these factors to compare to grades is because I feel that's the stereotype those in academia (students and professors alike) have, that somehow a lot of sleeping and no fun and studying a lot leads to good grades. I was curious whether that was true. Even though there's a huge negative correlation between activities and grades in my data, doesn't mean that I would sacrifice the time I spent on activities just so that I could get the "better grade". My jobs and student orgs made my experience, and I would still spend time on it again even if my grades suffer. That sounds like a really good project! Would love to compare notes and read about your results if you make it public somewhere!
jo909 10y ago
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.
sabujp 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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!
peter303 10y ago
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 10y ago
  I'd hate to have tabulated the amount of my life I wasted in tabulating.
stil 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 :)
gravypod 10y ago
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)
barry-cotter 10y ago
Can someone with vouching powers vouch for the author, tiffany qi, who has been shadowbanned?
- pluma 10y ago
  Seems like the ban was overruled.

86 points by dirtyaura 10y ago

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.

CardenB 10y ago
It's also reasonable to sacrifice short term happiness around long term happiness, in some circumstances.
- minimaxir 10y ago
  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 https://thetartan.org/2012/12/3/forum/mentalhealth
closeparen 10y ago
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 10y ago
  What a shitty system
  - closeparen 10y ago
    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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- treestompz 10y ago
  > Education at this level is a "who can survive the most unpleasantness" competition. This is brilliant. It sums up my feelings about education so succinctly. I'm stealing this.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > High school students work their asses off to get into highly selective colleges. Not necessarily true. I never worked hard at anything in high school, and was accepted by several ivy league colleges. My experience was not unusual. I did not work all that hard in college, but was accepted at Stanford for grad school. (I averaged maybe 30-40hrs a week on schoolwork in college, leaving plenty of time for other activities.) There were some who did work their asses off, but they were in the minority and I felt rather sorry for them. Either they were working inefficiently, or just weren't cut out for that career path. It'd be like me trying to be a pro athlete. I could work my ass off, and never get anywhere, as I have worse than no aptitude for it. Some also did no perceptible work and got straight As. I was a bit envious of them :-) they were amazing people.
- douche 10y ago
  One of the best times in my life was when I was in such a college environment, but instead of going through the grad school and corporate recruiting gauntlet, I opted out and planned on joining the military. I ended up in a software job I found on Craigslist instead, but not giving a fuck is still one of my best decisions.
tiffanyqi 10y ago
Author here -- thanks for the comment! I also would agree that GPA isn't necessarily the right metric here. The reason I chose all these factors to compare to grades is because I feel that's the stereotype those in academia (students and professors alike) have, that somehow a lot of sleeping and no fun and studying a lot leads to good grades. I was curious whether that was true. Even though there's a huge negative correlation between activities and grades in my data, doesn't mean that I would sacrifice the time I spent on activities just so that I could get the "better grade". My jobs and student orgs made my experience, and I would still spend time on it again even if my grades suffer. That sounds like a really good project! Would love to compare notes and read about your results if you make it public somewhere!

jo909 10y ago

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.

sabujp 10y ago

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 10y ago
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!

peter303 10y ago

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 10y ago
I'd hate to have tabulated the amount of my life I wasted in tabulating.

stil 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 :)

gravypod 10y ago

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)

barry-cotter 10y ago

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

pluma 10y ago
Seems like the ban was overruled.