Have you ever had a class with an obviously older student who’s always attentive, takes excessive notes, and attends every single class? They’re usually spotted with a wedding ring of some sort, and they get their homework done two days before it’s due? I think I may be turning into that student. After 4 years of skipping classes and sleeping through class and typing emails on my computer during class at UVA, and after 3 years of grad school where the first year of classes was spent involuntarily skipping class because inevitably I overslept my alarm and always being lost in class because I wouldn’t read beforehand or because I wouldn’t follow up on the classes I did miss … after all of that, for once, I actually feel on top of my Linear Algebra class.

I realized this during class today when, typical of undergrads on a Friday morning, about half the class was missing from lecture. I looked around and saw that not only was I taking notes on graph paper, but I was also writing incessantly and filled up an entire page to complement the professor’s one chalkboard (which translated to about 2 matrices and 2 lines of text on the papers of those students sitting around me). This was augmented by the fact that I actually read the textbook for 45 minutes before class to make up for Wednesday’s class (which I actually missed).

Anyways, when I looked around me and saw all the relatively blank notebooks compared to my entire page scribbled with writing was when I stopped and thought, “wow, I have become THAT student.”