Sometimes it may seem bad but its oh so good
Picture yourself in this scenario – it’s 8 a.m. on a Tuesday, the most dull and mediocre day of the week. The wind is blowing a frigid wrath about everything and is just waiting for you to step outside for your cold walk to campus. You think to yourself “Do I really want to walk through this and make it to my lecture? It’s not that important, I’ll pick it up from the textbook,” and you stay under the covers, warm and cozy.
But wait…don’t you have a midterm in a week from now? Nobody likes to be “that” person who emails the whole class looking for notes, and the textbook doesn’t cover exactly what the lecture went over. So you blank out, lose marks on your test, and you’re kicking yourself for missing that class.
It happens to everyone, certainly. However, what should be treated as a one-off thing can become force of habit quickly.
1. Make a new friend or two
Time spent in good company passes by faster. You’re in a new school, surrounded by literally hundreds of new people, and you should take advantage of it by making some new friends! You can exchange notes, complain about your pretentious TA, study together, make 11:20 a.m. on Wednesdays your weekly lunch meet-up – anything to make it more worth your while to go to class.
2. Get to know your professor
Your professors are people, too. They may be a little stuffy sometimes but they’re people who are, after all, experts on a subject who put a lesson together and go through it with you. Why not pick their brain a little deeper into the material? I’ve found doing this enriches the class experience tenfold, especially in seminars or labs where you’ll often be marked on participation and attendance, and cover more specific and in-depth topics from the lectures themselves.
3. Don’t be paying to use free services! (Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, etc.)
With tuition in Ontario at an all-time high, your motivation to attend to class can improve if you keep one simple thing in mind: what you are doing isn’t cheap. Why would you flock to time vampires like Facebook or Reddit, services that are 100 per cent free, in a class that you’re paying $700 to attend? That’s a ballpark figure because costs vary, of course, but when you realize just how absurd this is, it just makes sense to go to class, take it all in, and get your money’s worth out of it. In short, that hilarious cat .gif isn’t going anywhere in the next hour and it can wait until your free time.
4. Keep your “write-off days” for a good reason
It’s an accepted fact that it’s tough to get to class some days. It’s too cold out, you have another paper to finish and want to avoid an all-nighter – all perfectly understandable reasons to miss class. But that’s when you should miss class, for a good reason. Making excuses becomes a vicious cycle before you know it, and by final time, you’ll wish you had spent time more effectively in class. University is all about balance, and if you get trapped into losing time to make up for time already lost, that balance begins to falter and you’re left with a mess on your hands.