I know, I know. It’s a common saying that’s been talked to death, but today I want to share two unrelated but equally obscure ways of acquiring knowledge so you can stay ahead of the curve during your stay at UR.
First things first, social media. Though not widely accepted as a form of studying, there are so many good memes for any subject you’re having trouble with. Take me for example; I have a Russian vocabulary quiz tomorrow, and what do you know, I ran into a few vocabulary words I needed to know when I was scrolling through Instagram reels.
Take this phrase for example; Как одним видео оскорбить сразу три страны? I know like five of these words, I know that a few will be on the quiz tomorrow, and I know that one of them is in the prepositional case that I will be tested on tomorrow. (Editor’s note: None of these were in fact on the quiz.)
I’ve also found many quirky, relatable memes regarding working in an ochem lab. Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two and not teach the students I’m TAing something I can’t fully comprehend myself, that was written two generations before I was fucking born. Not to mention, some of the material also took professors days to figure out.
Maybe I should send this meme to my students so they can watch it before class; I’ll call it an attempt at a “flipped classroom” for my CASC project. Shout out to Professor Stanford for actually updating the curriculum after realizing that most TAs can’t even decipher some of the shit the old stuff is saying.
And don’t get me started on the bio memes. They are funny, I’ll give you that, but for moral reasons I refuse to talk about bio.
I ain’t fucking around on my phone for multiple hours while the existential dread of never being good enough creeps in. I’m definitely not feeling like I’m drowning in work and just treading water here but the longer I tread the more tired I get the less I can tread so I have to use overstimulation via social media to stop my brain from thinking. No. I am simply studying through multimedia stimuli through a self paced model.
[Hard cut to The Don (from “The Godfather”) putting Gooby (from “Gooby”) in a iron maiden]
Don: Do you ever gaze at the ducks floating in a pond, Gooby? Gently, gracefully, they float; like leaves or flower pedals, carried effortlessly by the water… you never see it, how hard they pedal.
Gooby (voice quivering): why are you doing this?
Don: PADDLING AND PADDLING THEY ARE PADDLING FOR THEIR LIVES GOOBY. AND YOU NEVER SEE IT. iT’S POETIC ISN’T IT? YOU NEVER KNOW HOW HARD THEY ARE PADDLING UNDER THE SURFACE. AND WE ARE ALL PADDLING GOOBY. WE ARE ALL JUST PADDLING FOR OUR LIVES GOOBY, PADDLING FOR OUR LIVES.
[The Don slams the iron maiden shut, Gooby screams, scene fade to black.]
Another good source of information is radio. No seriously. Have you ever wondered what Public Safety is doing at any given moment? Are you a Statistics or Political Science major, or a premed? Well, utilizing the radio is a great way to practice your skills.
Here’s the play: Create a heat map of PubSafe-related incidents on and around campus via the radio. Find if they have any sort of correlation and run linear regressions to test your hypothesis. Propose some policies to the school based on this data, or simply make some predictive models to see how many more cars will be jacked this semester. (This will utilize skills from PSCI 205 and STAT 212, and probably some other fancy smancy shit from the polisci ppl.) Idk, the unforeseen consequences of hypothetical policy proposals you make up in your head, is definitely some ECON 108-type shit.
Premed kids, I didn’t forget y’all. Did you know that the Rochester EMS net is still analog? So you can listen in with simply a Baofang for 25 bucks from Amazon. Listen in and get a taste of perhaps what you will be dealing with 10 years down the line. (Most of them are old people being unresponsive or having chest pain, but you do get the occasional gunshot wound or knife wound.) Maybe learn the Rochester area code or something. Most of y’all are Biology majors anyway, so I refuse to elaborate.
Idk, the sky is the limit here. We live in the information age so we gotta start to capitalize on it. Use what you learn.
And my gf has decided it makes no difference if she twists my balls off or not. It is what it is.
