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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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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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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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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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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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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I write this now not to be controversial or incensing, but to bring to the attention of the Daily Cal’s readers the potential to both minimize the chance of early — or any — onset of the aforementioned while also improving school performance on a comprehensive scale. I’m talking about cognitive enhancement and neuroprotection.

We live in the age of nootropics. Not many will know this term — I’m sure there are a number of cultural entities that feel “modification” of the human brain merits denouncement, but I’m not preaching to that audience. Nootropics are a class of cognitively active drug compounds that operate in a purely positive manner. The idea is that the use of this specific class of compounds will have minimum side effects in comparison to “old-school” methods of cognitive boosting (amphetamines being one example that also causes neurotoxicity).

What I’d like to discuss today is a particular strain of nootropic, one that acts upon the AMPA receptor in the human brain, known as ampakines. Ampakines are particularly interesting in that they are the contemporary focus in a number of clinical studies that involve extremely aged individuals with late-term cognitive degeneration.

This is all well and good if you’re an 80-year-old, for there is some hope of recovering lost cognitive function. But for the young and those not debilitated, it can be hard to acquire scheduled versions of medical-quality ampakines.

However, a solution exists outside of these more limited channels. The racetam family — my personal favourite being aniracetam for its fat-soluble qualities — affords a significant degree of neuroprotection while allowing for a higher degree of intercranial communication.

In other words, the drug helps your brain talk with itself more frequently.

Personally, I know two individuals on two seperate types of racetam regiments. One takes antiracetam; the other takes the water-soluble oxiracetam (which has a longer half-life). Both have raved about the changes it has made in their study habits. Comparing their prior semesters at Cal — the times they were not using nootropics — to their output now shows distinctively higher test performance, better lifestyle in terms of academics and overall improved mood (which could be a placebo effect, but also could be a result of their better grades). When they try to explain the experience to me, the language they use is heavily laden with linguistic metaphor. The first, who calls it “Ani,” explains it as if the “brain were a pool of thoughts, and what (you’re) thinking of is just the surface of that pool. Ani helps to bring the thoughts needed to the surface.” The second person explains it similarly, but uses language more evocative of a library: “It’s like the information in my brain is catalogued, and (racetam) rushes my thoughts to the right page.”

Now, there will be some who will pander about how there might be negative long-term effects or the fact that there hasn’t been enough research to prove what studies or users say is true. Keep in mind, rarely indeed do we know fully about causal effects in the human body — in nutritional terms, to say the least. But when I ask these same questioning individuals if they drink alcohol in volume, or copious amounts of caffiene during finals week, or perhaps if they smoke cigarettes, often the answer comes back as yes. Compared to the vast amount of research we have on the potential for damage these drugs cause, nootropics seem to be a far safer bet. With such positive potential — both short and long term — it’s hard to make an argument otherwise.

I’m not saying that taking a nootropic will allow you to stump your professor time and time again throughout lecture, but it might help you wrap your head around a particularly gnarly O-chem problem or perhaps ease the pain of writing those 10-pagers during finals week.

As always, think for yourself. Information is power, but power should be used wisely.

Johnny Dilley is a senior at UC Berkeley.

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