Come on Edinburgh students, it’s time for us to actually start going to our lectures

It’s 8.52am on a frigid Monday morning. Your alarm went off 13 minutes ago (which you quite violently snoozed).

Far away on Main Campus (a ten-minute walk to be precise), a lecturer is pulling up their first PowerPoint slide – probably one with a stock image of Calton Hill on it – and beginning to drawl on about something that, coincidentally (since you decided to not go), according to your degree programme, is foundational to your entire academic career.

You are scrolling through reels after reels about seemingly nothing.

This is fine. This is normal, you think. This is, if we are being honest, practically a rite of passage for all university students. The lecture will be recorded. You convince yourself you will watch it later. You have a system.

But you do not have a system.

The case against going (I hear you)

Oh god, not the charts

To be very fair, the skeptics are not wrong about it all. Some lectures are genuinely not worth the trek.

We have all sat through 9am lectures where the professor reads from slides, verbatim, that are inevitably already on Learn.

These slides you could absorb, from the comfort of your bed, in fifteen minutes instead of the fifty in a room that smells faintly like damp coats.

The argument for staying in bed is not always a decision influenced by laziness disguised as logic. Sometimes it actually is logic.

And in all fairness, the university does give you the recordings. They didn’t have to do that.

There is a logical, thought-out version of this practice where a student uses them strategically – consolidating tough concepts, revising past lectures in preparation, catching up after genuine distresses. Those students exist. They are responsible, focused, and probably very well-rested.

Let’s be honest though, that’s not you. You are the student who has 30+ unplayed recordings and the unshakeable belief that this time, by some supreme strength vested upon you magically, it will be different.

The unwatched lectures are like the books you promised you would read “once you get time.” It sits there, accumulating. And then suddenly Week nine has rumbled past with exams imminent, and you have carefully constructed an entire parallel degree that you are completing in your head.

By end of semester, you are stuck watching lectures at 2x speed with subtitles on, inhaling the content like a podcast that is just running in the background while you clean  and wondering why you cannot understand or remember anything.

Here’s the uncomfortable but universal truth – the recording, posed as a safety net, was actually a trapdoor.

RUK (Rest of United Kingdom) students roughly pay 61 pounds per lecture – which is more than a Ryanair flight to literally anywhere, or about fifty Greggs sausage rolls. International students pay somewhere between 170 and 240 pounds per lecture, depending on their degree. So essentially, some are skipping lectures worth a whole flight to Amsterdam.

While Scottish students are spared the financial guilt-trip, it is still years of your life being invested into this degree. Time, unfortunately, does not offer a Media Hopper replay.

The uncomfortable case for going

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Here is what nobody puts into consideration – that actually being in a room where active learning is occurring, against all odds, is quite enriching.

There is no algorithm in a lecture theatre. Nobody is serving you a notification encouraging you to engage in something funnier happening elsewhere.

The physical environment – uncomfortable squeaky chairs, the ambient sound of someone three rows back typing aggressively, a lecturer mildly irritated and half of the room is typing on their phones – actually serves a lot towards education.

It holds you there. And being held somewhere, with nothing else to do, is genuinely how a lot of information is absorbed.

You cannot pause a live lecture to check something, which sounds like a flaw until you realise that these apparently short pauses are exactly where cohesion exists.

You grasp the full picture instead of pausing and coming back to it which helps consolidates information much easier.

These pauses also let confusion in – and confusion, where you are forced to sit with it for sixty seconds instead of immediately Google-ing it, has a funny way of resolving and merging into an understanding.

And there is that bit that does not concern with your learning

Even if attendance happens, the weekly readings will not be done

The person you end up sharing a flat with in your third year. The group chat that comprises of your entire social life. That one person in your seminar who mentions about an opportunity that opens up many more doors to a variety of things. You don’t experience these in your bedroom at two times speed. You meet them in that dull lecture theatre.

University is never just about the degree that you get handed at the end of your course. It is about being present, despite the troubles.

You learn to genuinely live and not just exist. And lectures – boring, early, pointless – are one of those places that help you live by your design.

So, should you go?

Probably. Not always. But definitely more than you currently do.

The 9am on a dull Monday morning in December is not sacred – not something to swear by. Nobody is pretending it is. But if skipping has shifted from being a one-off incident to a quiet default setting, it might be worth asking yourself whether what system you think you have is actually working, or whether it is just procrastination that you have adopted into the vocabulary of flexibility.

The lecture theatre is cold. The seats were definitely designed by someone who never had to sit in them. Someone will be typing furiously.

Go anyway. You can always reassess from the back row.

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