Where there’s a whip, there’s a way

We don’t wanna go to Pulse today
But then the lecturer says: “nay, nay, nay!”
We’re gonna code all day, all day, all day!
Where there’s a whip there’s a way!

Bags under the eyes? Check. Bloodshot eyes? Check. Caffeine tolerance? Check. It must be exam period in Echo. From time to time, desolate inmates on a break from their Brightspace shifts wander around, lingering next to the coffee machines for a fix. An unlikely image to see on the TU Delft admissions page.

The last exam period had some of the best weather I’ve ever seen at this time of year (thanks, ExxonMobil!). And yet you wouldn’t have known it if you were cooped up inside thinking about aircraft stability margins or pavement performance modelling or the like. Shut the blinds, work until you drop, go to Drebbelweg, and when you’re done, wonder whether it was all worth it.

When does hard, honest labour veer into overwork? Strictly speaking, when the effort and time dedicated to work start weighing negatively on the rest of your life. Negative effects are quite tricky to calculate, especially because some people have apparently adapted to pernicious workloads. When I was on the Board of Studies in Aerospace Engineering, I found out that for a 15-ECTS quarter worth 42 hours a week, all courses were practically above the nominal workload.

Faculties need to fit more knowledge and skills in the same nominal workload

This is a systemic and institutional problem. Constant evolution in engineering practice means that faculties need to fit more knowledge and skills in the same nominal workload, even as it bursts at the seams. Evidently, when the study programme manager asks what can be removed, no department is going to argue for the removal of its own expertise either! Add to this the societal convention of grades as the determinant of subject mastery and the natural result is that students are going to cram and overfit for exams rather than cultivate a practical, intuitive understanding of the subject. Not that any of this is new (in Dutch).

My instinct is that a problem like this requires complex systemic solutions. But we don’t have enough words in the column to do this, so what can we do right now? I’ve started to take time to continuously evaluate my work by comparing input effort and output results. It shows a curve with diminishing returns: the more I put in, the less each marginal unit of effort obtains. Somewhere on this curve, there’s a sweet spot where I put in exactly the right amount of work to meet my objectives. It’s not possible to hit this sweet spot all the time, but I still think we should aim for it. Too little effort, and we risk failing. Too much, and we sacrifice something else in the beautiful tapestry of our lives.

So what about you? What are your objectives, and how much work are you putting in? Is all of it conducive towards meeting your goals? Or are you compulsively cleaning up LaTeX formatting errors in a report that will get an 8.5 anyway? Remember, where there’s a strategy review session, there’s a way.