Every type of student in an (online) lecture

Even if you can’t see them, they’re still there

4 years ago

It seems that for the near future, our opportunity to sit in a packed (or not, if you’re an English student) lecture hall has been lost. No more last-minute runs to Sidge, or Mill Lane, or New Museums, before realising that you’re sat in the wrong lecture and have no idea where you’re actually supposed to be. But where are your coursemates now? Are they huddled in bed with the lecture open on one tab and Twitter on another? Or are they still doing all of the reading and organising committee meetings and handing in their work a day early? Let’s find out!

Take me home, country roads (Image credit: Matthew Penner; stock image)

Student 1: “Can you send me the lecture handout?”

If you’re still this person now that everything has moved online, you should be ashamed of yourself. The answer, as always, is that THE HANDOUT WILL BE ON MOODLE. If it’s not on Moodle, the rest of us won’t have it either. Now that you don’t have an excuse to not go to the lectures, maybe you can find out the content for yourself?

IF THE HANDOUT IS NOT ON MOODLE I DO NOT HAVE IT EITHER

Student 2: 5 minutes late with a coffee

This person has rolled out of bed at 8.55, crossed the road to Sidge at 9.00, and turns up at 9.05 with a coffee in one hand and a Macbook in the other. Although this level of nonchalance can’t quite be achieved at home, it’s likely that this person will only have woken up five minutes before the lecture is due to be streamed, stumbled downstairs to make a coffee and got back into bed, while still missing the introduction. At least they no longer have to awkwardly perch on the steps.

Student 3: Colour-coded notes and pastel highlighters

I see you, person who is headed straight for a first and a very tidy graduate scheme. You’re the person I wanted to be before I got to Cambridge and realised that I’m too busy to do all the reading and instead will only skim-read the secondary criticism so that I can pretend to have an opinion. This person will have already found the lecture handout on Moodle, done any pre-reading and formulated a list of questions to be emailed to the lecturer afterwards. Instead of being sprawled in bed, this person will be sat at their (neat and tidy, Marie-Kondo’d) desk and be waiting on Moodle five minutes early. After making their ‘rough’ lecture notes, they’ll type them up and do further research for a well-rounded look at the topic – but at least they won’t be doing it in the library.

I am not this person because I only own one highlighter

Student 4: That one person with their phone on loud

It’s 2020! Who under the age of 40 keeps their phone on loud? (And on a slightly more bitter note, who even has that many notifications?) Luckily for them, this person can’t be judged when their phone goes off with an assortment of messages (WhatsApp, Facebook and Snapchat?!) – this time, they can reply without even bothering to hide their phone under the desk.

Student 5: “It’s okay guys, it’s self care”

This means that they go to one lecture in every three, and this is only because they would feel slightly guilty for not going to any at all. To convince themselves to get out of bed, they reward themselves for doing so – I like to buy myself an overpriced coffee from the Arc Cafe before spending the rest of the day twiddling my thumbs at the faculty. While it’s no longer possible to spend £4 on a brownie and a flat white, this person (me) will now allocate a handful of Maltesers to each lecture they watch. It’s all self care, right?

Student 6: There are lectures?

Enough said. This person has woken up at midday to a flurry of messages on their subject group chat asking about handouts / lecturers / wHy CaN’T I FinD iT oN MooDLe?, and then realised that they would much rather have been asleep anyway. You won’t hear anything from this person until October, when you find out that they did all of the summer reading and got a 2.1.