Last week Wednesday, Her Royal Majesty the Queen, Máxima came to visit Middelburg.
She was formally opening the center of teaching and learning; a new flagship promoting the excellence that is UCR. But that’s not all.
It has become a weekly event that our dear University College is proud to announce that, yet another newspaper took the liberty to write about the “excellent students” attending “excellent lectures” – and all because of the concept of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Now don’t get me wrong – I love living here, I love studying here and I actually love the city of Middelburg; it’s also quite remarkable that UCR is the only institution to receive the label ‘excellent’.
The word keeps popping up everywhere, excellence, but are we really those excellent students?
I think most students here will not label themselves as excellent, half may not even be that hard-working, look at me: I still have to do my reading for my courses tomorrow, not to mention actually do assignments, and yet I am procrastinating by writing this at 2 AM. Funnily enough, a recent study – I don’t know the source, but it was on ‘I Fucking Love Science’, so it must be good – showed that people who stay up late, have an on average higher IQ.
I know that most people are fonder of their bed during the night than I am, but I certainly know a fair share of students who respond to reading with a distinct: “Mweh, let’s leave that to when the exam starts”, which says a lot about the excellent mentality we clearly all possess.
All in all, I do have to agree with what a fellow student said to me a week ago: “What is going on? People used to drink alcohol and smoke weed and have fun regularly during the first few weeks, but now everyone is just…busy”. And all I can say to that is: this is probably going to be my first all-nighter of the semester and it is week 3.
Nonetheless, in the end the grades of most people tend to be way up in the A’s and B’s, even though most students don’t behave as ‘excellent’ as they should. But if there is one thing I learned in Stats 100 is that excellent student behavior does not cause excellent students, they are just positively correlated.
What exactly is excellence? Does procrastination make you less of an excellent student? Is being an excellent student a positive thing? My tutor told me that about a quarter of her new tutees came to her around week 4, crying their eyes out because of all the stress. Is this normal?
Our lovely Dean always has her triptych speech during IntRoweek, about the three goldfish that resemble life at UCR. In the end, sleep dies. But is that all excellence is about – cutting down on sleep to get the most out of your life?
MJV
