It has been quite an adjustment, the hardest part isn't really the content, there have just been assessment tasks that are more demanding in time than cognition. I think a big part has been these are introductory subjects.

You have much less agency over your schedule outside university itself than you would have when you're working as well, which has been a massive PITA having previously worked as a software engineer for quite a while. As an institution it just doesn't respect peoples time, which is fine when you're much younger and you're just coming out of school (another institution that doesn't care for your time outside of it).

I think my problems have been compounded by the fact this is a undergraduate degree not a masters. There was only a masters for applied Econ in my area (which is much less data and math focused than econometrics), I've had this conversation 100 times, not looking to repeat that, trust me the moment I see an option to change to a masters in my area of interest in the city I live in, I would jump at it. But my choice to go back to uni to some extent is an as much an act of consumption as it is getting a piece of paper to saying "you can trust this man with econ".

Anyways in these first year subjects, you'll have assessment tasks like "make a recording of you demonstrating your understanding of <basic function in excel>, explain the value of <basic function in excel>". They are easy subjects but they are also really time consuming so to some extent it feels degrading. I would take steps to skip the subject based on my prior experience but the focus of these subjects isn't even Excel, its just thrown in there because they anticipate you have little experience with these things and it'll be useful in later subjects when it becomes assumed knowledge.

Edit: phrasing

Despite how much I wish it weren't, this is exactly me. I seem to be able to only work under pressure, so as I got later into my degree I would start my work later and later, until it was standard that I'd start at 4am on the day it was due. A terrible way to function or to learn

But at some point, you either stop procrastinating as you find the absolute limit, or fail outright (which is why survivorship bias exists if you look at the student body and see the amount of procrastination).

12 credits is normally a minimum. That's roughly 12 hours a week in classroom, give or take. You need 3x that number of hours out of the classroom--that's 36 hours.

So, you're at 48 hours of academic work every single week. A 15 credit load means a 60 hour week.

Most people working jobs would start to complain about burnout at 50+ hours per week for 4 years running. They would almost certainly complain at 60 hours per week.

You also have to consider that a semester is 16 weeks. The first week or 2 of each semester is very light.

So we’re talking 30/52 weeks a year for most people.

For most people, you’ll never have that much free time again in your life.

College feels like a lot of work because you aren’t good at time management yet. And you remember the last few weeks of each semester where you are actually extremely busy.

Please tell that to the undergrad STEM professors, please. Almost all of mine had an assignment first class that was due by the third class.

Freshman engineering is generally Calc I, Physics I, Chem I, and English Composition/Writing and often some random engineering/computer thing. I assure you that schedule sucks even harder that it looks like it sucks, and it gets more time consuming as the years progress.

While there were lots of Party Hardy(tm) types in the College of Arts, the ones I knew who were taking their degrees seriously were working every bit as hard as the STEM folks. Possibly, they were working harder as they needed a lot more extracurricular work and achievement since what they were doing didn't have nice, clean objective measures like STEM does. They spent a lot of time being unpaid labor at functions and networking like crazy.

By contrast, no matter how many hours they worked me at my summer internship, it simply never compared to the grind at school.

We both agree that we had far more time in undergrad than at anytime since.

We frequently had small assignments the first week, but they were universally not worth much because many people aren’t even in the class yet since drop/add ran through the whole first week. They were also not very much work.

The point is there is no way you were spending 12-16 hours per class the first week.

I never spent that much time in Physics I, Calculus I or any English Class. The only classes I spent that much time on or more were higher level project based CS classes.

And even then I wasn’t spending that much time on them till closer to midway through the semester.

Then you get nearly the whole month of December off—Spring Break, Thanksgiving, and Summer.

No one expects anything from you at a summer internship. Companies don’t expect anything from experienced employees in the first couple months. Harder than a summer internship doesn’t say much.

On top of that you’ll never have fewer responsibilities than when you were at school.

It just seems like you had no free time because it’s the time in your life when you haven’t learned time management yet, and you remember the last few weeks leading up to final exams and semester project due dates.

You are so far removed from the ability of the average student that your personal observations about college simply don't generalize.

> I never spent that much time in Physics I, Calculus I or any English Class.

Do you understand just how far out of the norm that is?

Not everybody is coming from elite high schools and can blow through a college 101 class. The vast majority of engineers fight through all three of those--especially an English composition class. I had friends who did poorly in Calc I, dropped it but stayed in the class just so they plowed through it next semester. These aren't people "fooling around" with bad "time management". They were bog standard state school students who needed to get through, get out, and start making money. They were first college generation who didn't have rich parents backing them. They were motivated and got out in 4 years--something that most college students regard as difficult.

> No one expects anything from you at a summer internship.

Seriously? As a summer intern I always had deliverables. When I became a manager instead, we always had deliverables for co-ops and interns.

I dropped out the first time—2 years into a history degree—because I was working full time.

Eventually I moved home, and started over with CS. Despite CS being a lot harder, I had plenty of free time to work on a startup, build side projects, and play video games.

The reason was because a few years of experience made me much better at time management and prioritization.

I’m not saying you or anyone else was bad at time management as an insult. It’s just that college the time in your adult life when you have the absolute least experience at time management, so most people are very bad at it.

But also when you average it over the whole semester, none of my friends, even the ones who were bad at their classes spent 3 hours per credit hour outside of class. The ones who were bad at it tended to just skate by with Cs.

> As a summer intern I always had deliverables.

No one cares about those deliverables though. They aren’t trusting summer interns to do anything that really needs to get done.

IMO you’re observing Parkinson’s law, “work expands to fill the allotted time”. The students who take a million classes look like they have time management in check, and I’m sure some do, but they also are benefiting from the inverse of Parkinson’s law — if they can _only_ allot X hours a week to a task, they’re going to make the most of those X hours. This practically holds regardless of the student’s time management skills. I should know, I have horrible time management, and only succeed by overcommitting and rising to the challenge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law?wprov=sfti1

I was thinking of exams rather than day to day learning of basics, seeing tests as teaching rather than assessing. Point being you can't cheat at learning.

The calculator can't fake that you understand e.g. how to differentiate. The working is the bulk of available exam marks but the calculator only gives answers.

Is it unambiguous cheating if it doesn't help?

Knowing what the answer is supposed to be makes it much easier to reverse engineer the workings, and it lets you double check that your workings are correct. Also many of the more advanced graphing calculators (don't know the TI-89 specifically) have build in CAS systems and can do symbolic differentiation and as such help with showing your workings as well.

Plus the fact that these calculators let you store arbitrary data, so you can have your entire textbook stored in memory if you wanted.

I want to say something like "who learns advanced calculator functions solo but not the taught subject?" but of course shortcuts-by-rote spread like lice. I suppose that's the thrust of the problem with AI in schools

By that logic, you must also permit students another extremely well-established labor-saving technique: Hiring someone else do the homework/exams on their behalf!

After all, for students from certain families, forcing them to use the calculator personally would likewise be "robbing time from them", denying them valuable experience honing their skills in managing and subcontracting. They'll never be in a situation where they don't have a calc^H^H^H^H lackey.

I trust we can agree that (A) permitting outsourcing is absurd, (B) that cheating is not "ontologically good" even when reduces the total human labor, and (C) prohibiting the practice should not put a teacher into a state of stinky-fruit damnation.

I submit that we do care about how students do it and which skills they use, even if we disagree on what those are. It is not as simple as saying that good education means spurring them to supply Valid Answers By Any Contemporary Efficient Means.

We definitely should allow that for MBA students, since that will most closely mirror what they'll be doing once they get into the work force.

Your attitude makes sense in engineering but not in a math class for example.

We were not permitted to use a TI-89 in math courses since we were expected to learn the underlying concepts, which is much more than learning how to use a tool.

The reasoning was similar in physics. The instructors couldn't care less whether we used the CAS functionality of the TI-89 because that wasn't a part of their curriculum, but they were concerned about students downloading solver programs. (Most of the instructors would agree that creating our own programs to solve problems would be a valuable learning tool, but they had no way to determine whether we created those programs or someone else.)

Academic courses tend to be biased towards laying the foundations so that we can build upon our own knowledge. There are other types of courses that are purely concerned about applications and the use of tools.

You're not learning how to perform calculations in most calculus courses. Perhaps not even most algebra courses.

A given expression can be simplified/factored in multiple ways. That TI-89 is going to do it only one way. When working with a typical physics/engineering problem, the way you decide to arrange the terms can help tremendously in understanding the physics of the situation.

I hear this take only from people who've not gone ahead and done advanced (graduate) level work.

Frankly, I'm quite glad to be able to do basic arithmetic in my head -- having to pick up a calculator every time I need to multiply two numbers would burn through far more time over the course of my life than what I spent in Kindergarten (or whenever) learning to do it myself.

All you want is for people to be better slaves for your capitalist machine. Never learning how to do things themselves: only consuming, buying what could otherwise have been achieved by the simple (but non-GDP-increasing) exercise of their own mind. Your rhetoric betrays your own class.

You can't even imagine a reality any different than "Capitalist Realism"

Go read Mark Fischer.

I imagine some guy several thousand years ago: "Once we finish teaching this animal to pull the plough for us, descendants of The Tribe Between The Two Rivers shall have lives of pure leisure!"

The tool itself is not questionable or acceptable, it becomes questionable or acceptable depending on the usage. A pencil and paper can be questionable if the test is designed and expected to be completed without it.

You can design tests where an LLM spitting out python is an expected tool, but what are you testing for then? I doubt there are classes that teach whatever that test would be for yet.

I write at about 1200 words per day and I considered each fo the major multi-week assignments in my entry-level English courses to be worth no more than one day of my time apiece. For the finals, I gave them two days apiece, because I wanted an extra day to define the scaffolding for my argument.

My mother indicates that this is how she went through college too; very occasionally, a serious paper would require more effort than this, but for the most part it was “load assignment into brain, study assignment mentally until T-2d, write assignment, submit”. If several essays are due, then they have to be staged at various days numbered T-2d through T-5d for example — and it’s really important to not depend on T-1d existing at all due to courseware/internet/power outages.

I could technically write a worse essay the day it was assigned, but ultimately, I’m turning in A-tier work by this method. The hardest lesson was that I have to try not to wait until T-1d, because there’s a lot of risk encoded in that and it outweighs the value derived from having an extra day to think about it while I do other things.

But it wasn’t about “free time slipping away” — it’s just that I’m writing crap throwaway work that doesn’t matter after it’s done, and so I can barely motivate to care relative to literally anything else in my life that matters. Thus the T-2d compromise: I’m not about to give them precedence over literally anything, but I will concede that I do need to do so one day early, however boring it feels, because I’d rather have a crap day at T-2d than the same crap day at T-1d with the unproductive anxiety of risking a class-retake if my internet drops out.

Notably, when I actually genuinely care about what I’m writing, I’ll spend weeks researching sources and studying arguments and selecting quotes and then assembling it all over a couple days into a work of art — but assembly day is still always as late as possible in the time window assigned, because by then I’m most able to think and write about it efficiently and with a minimum of frustration. Not a zero of frustration, that is — I am a grouchy writer — but I’m healthy-grouchy on T-2d and bitter-grouchy on T-1d, so I do make the effort to put in my writing that day early now.

So: for your coaching efforts, try working with students to construct a working calendar that has non-writing activities in the leadup and then writing activities at the end. ie assuming a 7-day window,

T-7d: Assignment given: Read the assignment. (Seems obvious; is not obvious!)

T-6d: Think about your argument during your free time, while playing games or out at coffee or whatever.

T-5d: Try to construct a very halfass outline on a piece of paper. One sentence per argument you’d like to make, draw arrows to rearrange them. Not complete sentences, not punctuated, doesn’t have any structure at all. Point is that trying will help brain coalesce.

T-4d: Research references for fun. End up with far too many. Start highlighting quotes to yourself using highlighter or digital tools. If you’re going to experiment with a new tool, get it working and productive in 2 hours or discard it and do something shittier.

T-3d: Bind quotes to your argument phrases from that halfass outline. This may force reorg of outline; cool. Compile Works Cited from whatever you end up using so that you don’t have to fuck around with it tomorrow.

T-2d: Write paper, referring to outline / phrases handwritten note. Do one paragraph at a time. Plan to spend your entire day on this with 1 hour away from desk handling bio/sanity needs for every 2 hours at desk. Enforce that upon yourself.

T-1d: Finish whatever writing you didn’t feel like you were prepared to write on T-2d. Ideally try to do this earlier in the day than later, since that every hour you let this slip towards midnight l measurably increases your chances of a life outage causing you to fail the class.

The point of this schedule is to bake in the daydreaming / slow cooker aspect of the creative process but to keep it on the rails. I play video games extensively when I’m thinking about a paper because I can feed my literary brain the assignment to simmer and then go occupy my reflex brain with the game. I usually end up having to use some T-1d time but I’m getting better at managing my life’s dependencies ie. Food and Water and Sleep so that I’m more reliably at T-2d completion :)