If you go to Cal or went to Cal, there are definitely situations that you have experienced that grind your gears. When you try to explain these things to people who do not go to Cal, they may find your complaints to be very trivial. And although they are very trivial, when these irksome situations occurred, your thoughts were probably similar to something like, “10 out of 10, would punch someone in the face right now.” Here are a couple of things that might aggravate you if you are or were a Cal student:

1. When the Campanile just won’t stop … especially during midterms and finals weeks. We love the Campanile’s beautiful array of chimes and tunes, and we always love guessing which song it’s playing at the time. But when you have 24 hours until your next econ exam and your classical music study playlist is being overpowered by the sound of Katy Perry’s “Firework” in bell form, there’s a point when you have to say to the Campanile, “CAN YOU NOT?”

2. Studying on the weekends at night. This is especially troublesome for those living in the dorms and apartments on Southside. It’s a Saturday night, and you’ve got an exam on Monday. You told yourself you were going to be a responsible student this weekend and stay in on a Saturday night in order to finish answering all of those questions on that study guide. It’s 10 p.m., and you hear the stomping of the pregamers leaving down the hallway. You’re jealous that you aren’t one of them, but at least they’ll be gone for a solid couple of hours and leave you in peace. Three hours later, you’ve gotten a good amount of studying done, and after your third coffee, you’re ready to take on some more. It’s at that moment when you hear what sounds like the background noise of animals from “The Lion King” outside of your window and down the hallway. Nothing better than the sounds and smells of the intoxicated to get your brain waves going, are we right?!

3. Getting fliered at when you haven’t had your coffee yet. We all know the feeling. Especially if you have morning classes, the feeling of being the victim of active flier distribution on Sproul is essentially the same feeling you get when you see the person in your life who annoys the shit out of you the most. It’s really awful to think that, we know — and to those of you who pass out those fliers, please don’t take this personally — but we just can’t help it! The thought of having to force ourselves out of bed, crawl to our 9 a.m. classes and then be attacked by someone who is clearly on a much superior level of happiness than we are makes a person cynical.

4. Fliering at someone who hasn’t had his or her coffee yet. It works both ways, everyone. When you’re fliering for whichever organization you are a part of and you approach a random pedestrian with your flier, you may receive a look that suggests a phrase you might know: “Fuck off.” Your initial reaction might be “WHY DOESN’T ANYONE LIKE ME?” But please do not blame yourself, and please do not allow your self-esteem to go down just because someone ninja’d his or her way out of receiving your flier. It’s OK. It’ll all be OK.

5. There’s only one dude in the row, and he decided to take the seat on the very edge. Honestly, we’ve all probably done this. Of course, lefties are exempted from this category. But there’s always that one person who thinks that it’ll be a great idea to sit on the very edge and then get annoyed every time someone has to squeeze past him or her to get to a seat inside of the row. We have something to say to this person: “DUDE! YOU BROUGHT THIS UPON YOURSELF, OK? Stop rolling your eyes at me! And stop acting like my butt (rubbing against your desk and knocking over your papers) is Satan!”

What Cal pet peeves do you have? Let us know in the comments!

Image source: greg westfall. under Creative Commons

Contact Gabrielle Nguyen at gnguyen@dailycal.org.

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Edwin Cho/Staff

For those of you who finished your finals yesterday, congratulations on getting through them! For those who still have the rest of the week to go, we at the Clog would like to wish you luck and remind you how to spend those last few cram sessions in the library without reserving a spot for yourself on another stressed out student’s hit list.

1. Be sure to watch out for food patrol in Moffitt. You know those people with the white plastic bags and walkie talkies? They’re out for your cookies and Red Bull! They’re usually pretty loud getting off the elevator to start their sweep for goodies, so stash ‘em before they have to confiscate. If you catch them in a good mood they may let you finish off your drink before tossing it, but to be on the safe side just keep everything gulpable and/or munchable out of sight.

2. Be strategic when ‘studying’ with friends. If you can all manage to sit around the same table without splitting into peals of giggles about that latest Facebook hack, by all means congregate to work. If you lack the willpower (as most of us do), finding a cubicle or some other secluded area to hunker down in for a couple of hours is probably a better strategy. Once you’ve gotten some solid work done, then you can take a social media break. Trust us, they’ll be much more satisfying. And you’ll get a lot less glares from people who don’t have headphones to tune you out with.

3. Pack provisions. If you’re planning on camping out for a while, bring a sweater if you’re sensitive to the cold (Moffitt and Main Stacks are freezing at night!) and money and food so that you don’t have to trek back and forth between the library and your dorm room or apartment.

We lied, there’s one more thing:

4. STAY SANE. The library does crazy things to your brain if you stay there for too long. You’ll start to forget what sleeping in a bed feels like and that when the sun goes down the day is supposed to end. We know we told you to pack stuff with you, but be sure to get some fresh air between hitting the books and acing those finals! It’ll all be worth it when summer rolls around … in less than a week!

Good luck everybody!

Contact Erum Khan at ekhan@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter @erumjkhan.

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Rachel Balmy/Courtesy

With dead week rapidly approaching, the Clog is sure of one thing: We don’t want to pay $20 for a seat in Main Stacks this year. And no, we don’t want to squeeze between blaring iPods and ticking keyboards in Doe’s ever-so-popular reading room. To add to the ever-growing list of grievances, the basements of Dwinelle, loaded with potentially empty classrooms, is dark and creepy, and the Glade is crowded and chattery. What’s a desperate studier to do?

Lucky for you, we’re about to make it easier to wander away from Berkeley’s most overpopulated study spots. If you find yourself in a reading rut this dead week, try mixing it up with one of these awesome campus nooks!

1. Morrison Library: If you’re looking to peruse some texts, you can’t beat this comfortable little gem. Immediately on your right as you enter Doe, Morrison is filled with comfortable couches and secluded tables. If you can manage to get a seat, this is probably Berkeley’s most relaxing, stress-free and quiet reading environment. Except if you whip out your laptop. Then they’ll yell at you.

2. McCone Hall: Even though this is the geology building, we don’t advise you to study on the rocks (unless you have glutes of steel). If you take the elevator to the top floor of this building, there ‘s a beautiful west-facing balcony adorned with a couple of rarely used couches. And if this scenic spot gets busy, every floor of McCone has a small, sunny balcony with considerable privacy … oh, and spying privileges too.

3. Engineering Library: Believe it or not, the engineering library is not just for engineers! If you want to do some work on the computer in a room with killer air-conditioning, this is the place for you. Right next to Evans, this library has a huge assortment of study areas, ranging from silent reading nooks to collaborative group tables. Oh, and if you ask nicely, we’re sure you could get some masterful help on that last math assignment.

4. The chancellor’s front lawn: We probably should have saved this one for ourselves, but the grassy hills outside the chancellor’s house are the best outdoor study spot on campus. You can leisurely shift between sun and shade, enjoy the silence of low foot traffic and feed the squirrels. A towel to sit on and at least one bottle of water are always smart additions to your outdoor studying adventures.

5. Golden Bear Pool: So you just bought that new bathing suit but feel too guilty to go on a leisurely swim with so much studying left to do. Solution? Bring your books to Golden Bear Pool! Located behind Clark Kerr, this hidden oasis offers grassy slopes and a warm boardwalk that are perfect for lying out with some homework. Just try not to get distracted by the hottie in lane two.

Contact Katherine Velicki at kvelicki@dailycal.org.

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Raftery/Courtesy

We’re quickly approaching the time of year when the libraries, especially Moffitt, are becoming increasingly filled with tired, stressed-out students. It’s hard enough to find a seat — let alone a power outlet. If your laptop is dying, then you’re probably out of luck. A power outlet is the most precious commodity in the library during dead week. Heck, we wouldn’t even be surprised if someone tried to sell the one they’re using on Craigslist.

An easy way to avoid this problem is to bring your power splitter or strip. Yes, we know that sounds incredibly dorky, but you do already go to Cal, and it’s worth it if it means keeping your laptop alive. It’s an easy way to guarantee yourself a power outlet and possibly be a hero at the same time by providing extra power outlets to all.

However, we do know there could be some problems with this idea. People could accuse you of stealing the power strip when you leave, so be sure to put your name on it. You’ll also want to make sure the person who let you use the outlet in the first place gets his spot back when you leave, because it’s the right thing to do.

Now, if you’re in Haas or feeling capitalistic, you might see this as a business venture: I could rent out each outlet on my power strip. Please don’t. Yes, I know it’s simple supply and demand, but don’t. We all will think you’re a dick if you do this. Just be a good member of the community, and share with your fellow students.

You probably have an extra strip or splitter lying around your room, and if you don’t, they run for less than $10 — or you could check one out for free from Moffitt. It’s something you’ll be grateful to have if you’re stuck in Moffitt with a dying laptop.

Image source: Ton Raftery under Creative Commons

Contace Daniel Radding at dradding@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @Dradd510

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Svein Halvor Halvorsen/Courtesy

You may think that your professors have a considerable influence — some may say an unnecessarily large one — in your life. They wield the power to summon you to a room at their discretion, hold you in said room for inordinate amounts of time, consume your time with incessant amounts of work and see into your mind with incomprehensible exams. Well, students, brace yourselves, because their influence just multiplied with the ability to track our reading and study habits even when we’re in the relative safety of our dorms.

CourseSmart technology has created a system that tracks your progress using digital textbooks or e-books. It has the capabilities to log the time that you spend on each page, when and how many times you access a book and whether you highlight or take notes on specific parts of a section. And the best part for the professors is that all of this data can be consolidated into a single number — an engagement index. Effectively, they can know if you’ve fallen asleep while studying if you stay on a page for hours, if you’re a stereotypical procrastinator who waits until the night before to open the figurative cover or even if you’ve subtly been scrawling obscenities about them with the note-taking feature. It’s been deemed as a sort of “Big Brother” by a dean who employs it in her school. Yeah, that’s how creepy it has the potential to be.

There are many flaws with this technology. Some of us have the enviable superpower of never having to open a book and passing the class — so would we be penalized for having a low index score if we can still ace an exam? Would a professor be more biased when grading your paper if he or she knew you hadn’t opened the book — even if you had somehow managed to compose a masterful work worthy of publication?

But we suppose every evil has its advantages. Professors — especially the ones who require you to buy books they’ve personally written — will finally be able to see how effective (or ineffective) these books are to the class. A potential benefit — well, it could swing either way from a student’s perspective — would be that professors have the ability to gauge the difficulty of their classes and adjust their teaching style and content. A broader issue would be whether this would mandate the use of e-books throughout classes. Some students have claimed that e-books are not conducive to their learning, as they are a mouse click away from the infinitely more entertaining options of Facebook and Netflix. More importantly for the well-being of the average student’s wallet, mandating e-books would probably decrease the spending output for textbooks, as even the least tech-savvy people have mastered the two-finger flick of Control-C (or Command-C for all you fancy Mac users), enabling them to share the data.

A common inspiration for this was whether students are “really learning if (they) only open the book the night before the test.” Well, the response to that, Mr. Guardia — the utterer of that nonsense — is a resounding “damn right,” which you would have known if you looked at our test scores. Fortunately, this new technology hasn’t been adopted by Cal administration yet, and hopefully it never will be. Students have always found ways to circumvent their educators’ flawed attempts to control their home lives, and this is no different.

Class dismissed.

Contact Uday at umehta@dailycal.org and follow him on Twitter at @mehtakid.

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Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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While trying to find somewhere to write this column Wednesday night, my roommate and I ended up wandering through Main Stacks.

Presumably because it is “midterm season” — which at Berkeley just means anytime after the first month of class and before finals — the library was packed. We spent 20 minutes searching the three floors there and annoying row upon row of faces peering seriously into screens illuminated by Facebook.

While we wandered, my roommate kept muttering about how much she hates Berkeley and all the “try-hards” sometimes. I ended up leaving the library alone two hours after we got there but was awoken at 2 a.m. by the sound of my roommate returning home after six hours of studying.

There is a performative aspect to going to the library. When you sit down at one of the heavy wooden tables at Stacks, you are signifying your intention to engage in the heavy task of scholarship. Your uncomfortable chair and implied promise of silence are indications of your seriousness — indications that what you must now do requires your complete and undivided attention.

But if that’s the case, then why had so many of the people in the library Wednesday night trekked all the way out there just to procrastinate on Facebook?

One answer would be that it’s easier to accomplish something when you’re in an atmosphere that encourages accomplishment, and with their intense seriousness, Berkeley’s libraries definitely do that.

But I think they do something else too, something that equally encourages us to drift toward Facebook. When we are surrounded by 100 serious-faced students, it’s easy to see that seriousness as competitiveness, to realize that they might also be putting all of what they have toward goals a lot like ours, goals that only so many of us can accomplish — that they might be just as much of a try-hard as we are.

The reason we drift toward Facebook, I think, is because we aren’t sure exactly how much we are capable of putting toward our goals, and we are afraid of finding out. One of the signs of perfectionism is procrastination — what we might think of as Facebook-browsing born out of the fear that once we actually start working on what we have to do, we won’t be able to do it successfully; that we might get to the point where we have tried as hard as we can and it just isn’t enough.

How much effort is enough, anyway? Is it enough to be one of the smartest people in a specific class? In a specific major? At UC Berkeley in general? Is going to UC Berkeley enough? What if the campus’s ranking, even if we understand how arbitrary rankings can be, goes down? And after that, is it enough to get the best job? Is it enough to get the best job among our friends or among the people who came from circumstances similar to ours? Should we take badly paid internships in order to get to those jobs? Unpaid ones? Should we pay employers to give us the experience we need to succeed?

And then there’s the way the Internet has given us such a convenient way to compare ourselves to one another. It only takes a few seconds to scan classmates’ LinkedIn profiles and see their entire professional history or to go through their Facebooks to get a handle on their social one.

Pressure on a college campus, or more broadly the pressure of being a young person trying to invent yourself, aren’t novel concepts. Coming to college means being given a chance to reinvent yourself, to build yourself from the bottom up into a perfectly new person in a new context. Decontextualized, we are faced with the terrifying prospect of being whatever we want.

And as “the best public university in the world,” Berkeley has a special brand of this pressure. The rhetoric here is complex. Being the best public university doesn’t mean we are the best overall, necessarily; it means we are the best among universities funded by the public good. The implication in that rhetoric, I think, is that the reason we are the best is because we are the product of the people. We’re people who have worked our way here, rather than being given this opportunity through some kind of legacy program.

That value, the value of being self-made, is both wonderful and terrifying. At least theoretically, if it is true, it means we are here because we deserve to be. But it also means that both the success we seek and the failure that pursuit might ultimately end in are on our own shoulders. And sometimes that’s a thought that drives me toward the distraction of Facebook.

Contact Sarah Burns at sburns@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @_SBurns.

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Maura Chen/Staff

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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Desperately soaking up a semester’s worth of course material can be a boring and monotonous task for some and an anxiety-ridden and stressful time for the others. Common among both types of students is the mind-wandering that occurs after a short time of studying.

A great way to destress and add life to your study sessions while improving your concentration is by listening to music. Here is a Daily Cal-curated playlist that should do the trick. Happy studying!

1. Eg Anda – Sigur Ros
2. First Breath After Coma – Explosions in the Sky
3. Transitions – El Ten Eleven
4. Positive Force – Delicate Steve
5. Natural Anthem – Postal Service
6. Untrust Us – Crystal Castles
7. I Will Possess Your Heart – Death Cab for Cutie
8. Get Innocuous! – LCD Soundsystem
9. Kid A – Radiohead
10. Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect – The Decemberists

Contact Hailey Simpson at hsimpson@dailycal.org.

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Christine Villanueva/Staff

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