Being a student, 10 years later

Being a student after working for 3 years is not easy, especially taking 9 credits in 6 weeks and studying for possibly one of the most important exams in my career.

But as I am sitting here working on my weekly Intro to Epidemiology homework, I found it fascinating to compare to my student years 10 years ago in 2005. In 2005, I was merely a freshman, going on to become a sophomore. That summer I took Introduction to Physics I for Engineering Majors, which truly was a very dry but very concrete subject. I went to 4 hours of classes in the morning, did my homework in the afternoons and worked in between homework. I worked a part time job as a lab assistant, mostly doing simple preps and washing lab ware.

Contrast to now, 10 years later, I am taking Introduction to Biostats for Public Health, Introduction to Epidemology, and a Public Health Seminar. I go to class from 8 to 5 every day, work on homework in the evenings and weekends. In addition, every waking minute where I am not working on school work, I am studying for my ABIM board exam. In addition, I am also interviewing for jobs, tying up loose ends for employment and trying to put out fires on my research project. But then again, I am being paid at a rate of probably $18/hr as opposed to $7.5/hr, and I have health insurance benefits!

What I found even more fascinating is that 10 years ago, I would be doing my homework with my text book, lined loose leaf paper, pencil (or pen) in the library. I had a laptop at that time, with specs reading something like 40 gb (at most). Contrast to today, I am listening to recorded lectures on youtube, reading my professor's announcements on Canvas (an online classroom platform), taking notes in evernote, writing my homework in google docs, and all the while doing this on three monitors. All of my calculation I can do either with Excel or Stata, though I still have a scientific calculator that's only for exams.

Sitting inside the classroom, other students are taking notes with either their ipads, Mac books or a few with laptops. Contrast this to 10 years ago, where everyone except perhaps a privileged few took notes on their notebook.

But then, there's the difference where 10 years ago I lived 1 block from campus, and it took me 15 minutes to walk to class. Now I live 30 miles away from campus and takes me 1 hour or so to get to class... 

The difference is quite stark, but then again, as a good epidemiologist would say, while analyzing the relationship between era and education methods, this is being confounded by the fact that I am much older and am a working adult! This is, of course, only a short personal musing in between pages of Evernote, Google Docs, YouTube and Canvas.