It’s a tale as old as time: You pack your bag with all your required readings and head to a nearby coffee shop with good reviews online, only to find that the layout of the cafe makes it absolutely impossible to get any work done. You order an expensive latte anyway — you’re already here, might as well — but you end up chatting with a friend or getting distracted by your phone instead of having the productive day you had planned.

Rather than splitting their time evenly, students trade their sleeping hours for working hours as a way to demonstrate their commitment to achievement. Students here compete to see who can make their life the most miserable and then brag to their friends about their supposed accomplishments.

Textbooks. Every time a new semester rolls around, it’s time to get a new stack of them. Textbooks are the bane of students, being oversized, expensive lumps that burn a hole through our wallets. Often, professors don’t even use these books, except for homework problems, leading to what students view as a gigantic waste of money.

High school was a breeze for many of us at Wash. U. We could get away with nominal studying, and it became fashionable to put off studying until late at night. Even if we had a fair amount of homework, it was rarely challenging, so this was completely doable.