Study Hacks Blog

Does Being Exceptional Require an Exceptional Amount of Work?

The Obama MethodBarack in Crowd

In response to my recent article on Misery Poker, a reader commented:

I wonder about the really exceptional people. Does Barack Obama “build a realistic schedule”? … maybe extraordinary stress IS required to accomplish extraordinary feats

Another reader added:

I think extraordinary sacrifices are required for great accomplishments.

This is a fascinating argument. Study Hacks, as you know, is driven by the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, which claims that it’s possible to be both relaxed and impressive. But these commenters are pushing back on this world view. It’s one to thing, they note, to have a successful college career that is also relaxed, but is it possible to have an exceptional career without overwhelming amounts of work?

In this post I claim it is possible. And I’ll explain exactly how…

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Do You Play Misery Poker or Quack?

College WoesPoker

A Swarthmore student recently clued me into an interesting fact about life at this competitive school:

The whole predominant atmosphere here is stress, stress, and more stress. We even have a term called misery poker.

Naturally, I asked her for an explanation. She responded with the following sample dialog:

“I have two midterms, a 10 page paper, and I’m headed to a conference next weekend,” says the stressed student

“Oh yeah?,” replies his bleary-eyed friend. “I’ll raise you all that, and add a lab report”

The winner is the student whose life sucks the most.

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The Science of Student Burnout

Precursors to College Student BurnoutDeep in Thought

In 2006, professor Richard West of the University of Southern Maine, working with his student Stephanie Cushman, launched a study to find out more about student burnout. They hoped to answer two questions:

  1. How many college students experience burnout?
  2. Why do they burnout?

I recently stumbled across this paper in the Journal of Qualitative Research Reports in Communication. As you might imagine, I was quite interested in what they found…

The Study

Dr. West’s gave 354 students in an introductory communications course the following survey:

  • Please define or interpret what is meant by college “burnout.”
  • Have you experienced burnout in college?
  • What were the factors that contributed to your burnout in college

He discarded the surveys from students who had not experience burnout or who had defined the term to be something different than the phenomenon being studied. A rigorous coding technique was then used to categorize the responses to the third question.

The Results

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The Goldilocks Strategy for Choosing the Perfect Workload

The Student Work Saturation Point

Tasting Porridge…

The hardest part of building a quality student lifestyle is figuring out how much stuff you should be doing. Some students are clearly slackers. And some are clearly grinds. But for everyone else, especially those trying to follow the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, a nagging question lurks: how do I know if I’m doing the right amount of classes and activities?

In this post I want to discuss a simple approach for designing an optimal workload. I call it the Goldilocks Strategy for obvious reasons: we’re looking for the proverbial work porridge that tastes just right.

To understand this strategy, however, we must first touch base with the reality of how our workload interacts with both our impressiveness and our stress…

The Work Saturation Point

Consider the graph at the top of this post. I’ve plotted two lines. The blue line represents your impressiveness and the red line represents your stress level. As you move from left to right, this represents an increase in your workload (both academic and extracurricular). Therefore, the graph shows how both your impressiveness and stress change as your workload increases.

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Monday Master Class: How to Keep Life Interesting with a Saturday Morning Project

A Dash of SpiceWeekend Work

Have you finished your mid-semester dash? If not, make a plan to do it! I’m already hearing reports from readers of huge post-dash stress reductions.

Once you’ve completed this purge, return to this post. Below, I will teach you how to keep your newly stripped down student life from becoming too boring.

The Grand Project

Readers of How to Win at College know that I’m a big fan of what I like to call: “Grand Projects.” I introduced the idea on the blog early last winter, but haven’t given it much attention since then.

Let’s change that.

Here’s the basic definition:

A Grand Project is any project that when explained to someone for the first time is likely to elicit a response of “wow!’

The purpose of a grand project is two-fold:

First, it injects excitement and possibility into your student life. As I said in last winter’s post: “[A Grand Project] focuses you through the small ups and downs that litter the standard student grind. It gives you higher purpose.”

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How to Become a Deep Thinker at College

Seeking WisdomThe Thinker

A reader from Princeton recently asked me an interesting question. He first highlighted a phrase I once used to describe a group of straight-A students:

…they have trained their mind to think hard, produce subtle, nuanced arguments, and find deep connections between ideas.

He then asked: “how do I do that?”

In other words, this reader wants to actually live the promise hastily tagged onto the liberal arts experience by its many defenders: to learn how to think. He wants to know how he can maximize the increased mental sophistication that college can provide (but by no means guarantees).

I want to describe a simple technique that could help this reader — and you, if you’re so inclined — send his brain development into overdrive.

It requires three steps:

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