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Comment by easeout | Hacker News Reader

Best advice I received on my way to college: Don't take any 8:00 AM classes. You won't go.

I went to every maths class in university (maths I - IV) and they ALL were Monday 8am, Wednesday 8am. What a terrible decision, given that these are the classes most people fail.

> given that these are the classes most people fail.

Depends on the country, but it could be that this is intentional - having those lectures at 08:00 raises the difficulty bar, helping to fail more students, which is exactly what the class is for in the first place.

In my university time, the math class that most people fail would also have lectures at 08:00[0]. It was also widely known that the class is just about getting us up to speed with calculus, as it is to filter out a good chunk of the year. My understanding, shared by fellow students and even faculty members, is that universities in Poland (and I suppose most of EU) tend to admit ~1.5-2x the number of students they can handle, and use first two semesters to filter out tat ~0.5-1x excess. In STEM courses, those intro math classes were understood to be those filtering classes.

[0] - What's worse, on the first lecture, the professor wisely noticed that some of us will be hitting rush-hour traffic trying to get to the lecture on time, and suggested that... we should all start 15 minutes earlier, so we can avoid the traffic by waking up and traveling 15 minutes earlier... I think I attended one or two more lectures of that professor, at which I fell asleep few minutes in, and eventually decided it's just pointless waste of life.

You went somewhere that you had choice.

I, on the other hand, went to a local branch of a state college. So many classes were only available in one time slot, which meant that I had both classes that started at 8am and classes that started at 6pm.

Attendance wasn't always optional.

I hated classes that started after 3pm, and schedules that weren't mostly back to back.

I once tried to take Quantum Mechanics at 8am. I went for a few weeks, and then I started falling asleep in in class. One day I realized before getting out of bed that I just fall asleep there, so I may as well stay in bed, and it was all over...

...so I tried again next quarter. This time, it was Quantum Mechanics A--I had previously tried skipping into C--so the professor probably just thought I couldn't handle the material without the stuff that came in A/B, and realized I was in "the wrong one". Well, it happened again.

I tried a third time. This time, showing up to B, the professor must have figured out what was happening and I kind of remember her laughing at me a bit. When it happened a third time I gave up, stopped ever trying to do early classes, and, 20+ years later, give students the advice you were given ;P.

Scheduling Quantum before 10am should be a crime. It's hard to stay awake for even when it's not directly competing with sleeping in. Our class ended up rescheduling Quantum II because having it first thing after lunch was too much of an invitation to snooze. Luckily the class was small enough that a quick survey found we could push it back an hour.

There's nothing like getting saddled with an 8am chemistry lab class on a Friday. Considering the deals your average college bar puts out on Thursday nights, odds are high either you or your lab partner are brutally hungover. You better enjoy smelling ethanol for the next 4 hours with that going on in your head.

How many students are actually going to bars and getting drunk? Most students are going to be under 21 for most of their college career. Hopefully by Junior / Senior year students will know how to manage their schedules.

A lot of students have fake IDs. Depending on where you look up the information it could be from anywhere from 32% (1) to 69% (2) of students surveyed, and keep in mind there is going to be a bias to lie since its technically a crime. Who knows how many more are borrowing a legitimate ID from an older sibling or similar looking older friend, or are just trying their luck that the bouncer isn't going to card tonight. At a big undergrad school, that's potentially a few thousand kids under 21 getting drunk a night even if a fraction of fake ID holders are capitalizing on their access. Then there's also the kids that prefer to stay in and play video games. League of Legends was the big draw when I was in 10 years ago, I saw kids put in serious shifts in that game in the study rooms of the dorms. All this being said, studying is often isolating and depressing and there are plenty of outlets for college students of every persuasion to put it off as long as possible.

1. https://www.veriff.com/blog/fake-id-statistics

2. https://www.thelantern.com/projects/2021/04/28/fake-ids-join...

That's US-specific, though. Most of the world has lower drinking age, with 18 being most common, I think - at least any country I know, other than USA, draws the line at 18 y.o. In those places, getting drunk and partying starts during the final year of high school.

Heh, we had a Physics lab for 1 semester that was 3-"whenever you're done" on Fridays. It was not unusual for the Juniors to leave some Sophomore to watch the experiment before hitting the campus bar.

I always found that Tuesdays were the best deals. Although I've also found that self-control was not a problem both in terms of choosing not to drink, or drinking less and leaving earlier.

The CS department at my university knew their audience. The very earliest classes started at 11, and you could easily build a schedule with afternoons only. The Physics department avoided 8ams, but tended to load mornings. It made the double major pretty easy to schedule.

Not everyone can choose. At my uni we are just assigned classes and that's it.

Same, but luckily the lectures weren't mandatory to attend so we just sent a different designated note taker from the friend group each time and the rest slept in and copied from them lol.

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