The 6 Most Counterproductive Things You Learn in College

College culture coasts on the idea that everything is absolutely fine until it isn't. Exams exist as black holes, theoretical objects that seem to be insane distances away, but the closer you get to them the more terrible stresses you'll encounter, and absolutely everything will lead to those types of stresses.

NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and R. Gendler (for the Hubble Heritage Team) Acknowledgment: J. GaBany

What happens when even Apollo fails under the pressure.

This single ultimate stress point leads to self-destructive behavior and nonsense, like cramming. You can't wedge an entire course into your head overnight. There's a reason you don't see neurosurgeons hunkered down outside the operating theater flipping through their textbooks. And their entire job is opening up someone's skull and just stuffing things in there. If anyone knew how to cram, it would be them. But when they get something wrong it means someone else is stupider.

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"Oh man, I knew this bit before coming in here."

Worse, this all-consuming examgularity creates a bullshit binary expectation for life: either everything is fine, or there's a problem and all possible efforts must be bent only to its solution. Real life doesn't work like that. Real life is made of ongoing problems, and if one unresolved issue stops you from relaxing, you might as well get started on your heart attack now.

Convince people that they're in an exceptional situation and many will cast aside every social convention that makes it possible for society to exist without detergents having to advertise how good they are at removing blood.

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"Our new Hemocleanse washes idiot-juice right out of your jacket elbows!"

Many first-year college-goers are just now working out how to deal with life as legally distinct adults. The first thing exam season teaches them is "problems suspend all normal behavior." The resulting panicked-herd instinct encourages more self-destructive behavior than aliens on a starship. They ramp the binary stress up to an entire mode of being. Students talk about late-night cramming, sleep deprivation, and time-saving-via-malnutrition, not as ways to destroy a healthy human body but as new strategies they're inventing and trying out.

Some students put so much work into avoiding work that their excuses could probably qualify for independent American citizenship and at least two tax breaks. The rise of the machines won't be caused by a rogue military, but by a computer science student trying to program a computer to do his assignments for him.

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"SURRENDER YOUR HU-MAN SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS 34 THROUGH 56."

All this work is dedicated to getting an extra week, day, even an extra hour to work on the assignment. I knew one guy who would count on the time difference of a secretary getting back from lunch to finish filing applications. And he was staff. All of this extra work to avoid simply finishing what they can in the time they have. Which is a way, way more valuable skill in life than that week's assignment. And certain patterns of breathing.

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Getting shit done: so useful that banana-fiber smoothies should be an intellectual supplement.

Instead people learn to keep punting problems forward until the last possible moment. Creating a rolling avalanche of catastrophe to chase them through life. And if they trip just once -- they get sick, there's a family emergency, or their buddy Six-Pack-and-Netflix calls too often -- it all comes crashing down on them. Anyone who's worked in an office knows this pattern causes at least a quarter of all e-mail. "I'm asking you this because now I have an excuse not to proceed until you respond, which is why I didn't phone, because then you'd give me an answer immediately."

But constant quizzes and course assignments exist in a state of "done" or "ohfuckleberry salad." Even without social pressures and basic fatigue, multiple courses are competing for each student's time. All demanding that the student get everything over and done with so that they can concentrate on other things. Which builds a preference for finding the solution instead of truly finding the problem. Online solutions, copying from others, searching through textbooks to transcribe something that looks about right -- the constant pressure drives many students to achieve deliverables instead of learning. And the instant they use a word like "deliverables," they've opted for the myna bird strategy of making the right noises instead of understanding things.

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Unfortunately, modern plumage isn't nearly as brightly colored.

I'm going to give you the greatest advice I ever received in college so you can combat this. And like all the best advice, I didn't listen to it at the time. Just like the person who gave it to me didn't listen to it when he heard it and then implored me to. So I'm going to pass it on to you in the hope the next generation does better.

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"You have learned nothing from our example."

Read chapter 24 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The bit about the stuck screw. Obviously you should read the whole book if you can, but I'm not going to help much if I'm just adding to your reading list. But seriously, read that chapter. It's all about the importance of learning from the problem, taking the time and effort to upgrade yourself and your understanding through the act of solving it. Otherwise you're left bashing your head into something until you extract some vague result that can keep you going.

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"You have now learned the wrong thing from our example."

You want to get the best benefit from your time. So it's a shame students often feel pressured into doing the bare minimum to make the next arbitrary checkpoint. The most extreme example of this is being told, "We'll study sections 4, 5, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.5," and because of that the pages of 6.3 and 6.4 will never see the light of day. Sure, you probably don't have time to work them out to the same degree as the sections you know you'll be tested on, but are you going to spend hundreds of dollars on textbooks and then not even read them?

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Especially since the only thing more expensive than university textbooks are those ultradiamonds.

Reading the whole book widens your understanding, makes new connections, and often makes you much happier about the sections you're assigned. Because those skipped sections are usually the "Here's what happens when we DON'T make all those handy simplifications."

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"This 1+1 stuff can really get out of hand."

Sure, there aren't marks for it, but so what? If you're not graded on that part of existence, it's suddenly not true or important? Are you guaranteed to never need it? Remember: you're not going to be looking for a job in "Knowing exactly and only the ENG 104 syllabus"; you're going to be an engineer or whatever, and the better you are at that subject the better things will work out for you.

It also ignores diamond's tetrahedral covalent bonding. Most materials don't do that. Which is why stress makes diamonds but breaks almost everything else. That's why people need university courses before designing buildings and things in the first place. Stress is and has been the worst response to problems since those problems stopped being hungry bears. You stress something and, instead of absorbing impacts, the least touch can cause it to shatter.

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"This was a bad idea!"

Far better to work on those academic ultradiamonds. Or the idea of using intelligence to make something smarter and better than before, instead of using a load of pressure and time to keep crushing material until someone else says it's OK. A student should be working to improve themselves instead of completing a checklist. Because education is the best idea our species ever had. And it's how we'll have even better ones in the future.

Learn even more with 7 Tips for Not Screwing Up College and 9 Lessons From the Greatest College Movie Ever.

Students should know how to avoid the worst social media disasters, and how to mix coffee cocktails for pure productivity power.

Luke has a website, tumbles, and responds to every single tweet.

And be sure to check out 6 Important Things Nobody Tells You About Grad School and 5 Math Equations That Change the Way You See the World.

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