Now everyone knows why I am bored with advice to graduate students and junior faculty: I was born knowing some of it, and I got more information on how to work from crack Asian graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty on sabbatical, all in scientific and technical fields, freshman year.
I also learned important slacking skills from European graduate students closer to my own field. I will spare you the more charming of these stories and cut to an important conversation over dinner with two new graduate students, one from London and one from Paris, in my very department.
They were in a Shakespeare-cum-theory course which was apparently quite irritating.
Parisian: I have spent the whole afternoon reading Shakespeare, and I do not see that it has done me any good!
Londoner: Surely not. That is why I spent the afternoon asleep!
For bonus points, guess the genders of the Parisian and the Londoner.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
A midsummer day’s dream? 🙂
Slacking — or ‘resting’, as I think of it — is absolutely and utterly important. I belong to the subgroup Bengali within the larger subgroup South Asian within the group Asian, and we’re infamous for our ability to loll about, doing nothing, and pretending to be fine intellectuals while at it.
I’d say your Parisian dinner companion was female, and the Londoner a male. This is a completely arbitrary assigning of genders, BUT I’ve noticed women tend to be more conscientious about completing assignments and men tend to take it easy or improvise. Then again, it’s Americans I have seen do this, not Europeans.
Well there’s resting, and then there’s also deciding when it’s not worth putting in your best effort, which is also important. Real slacking isn’t even that, of course.
Correct on gender! Of course the Londoner, probably steeped in Shakespeare from birth, could totally afford to affect disaffection; nonetheless it would of course be a man who decided the course was too irritating and make the strategic move of sleeping through an afternoon of study.
I think you’ve just inspired me to write — eventually, see ref. to Bengali laziness above — not one, but two posts. One of them quite tangential, and on the demand for class-attendance at the graduate level, where a student would be *far* more productive studying by herself in the library.
This has been my primary pet peeve with the US postgrad system of education. I resent being hauled to class by regulation, and then sit through the ‘democratic’ inanity of people trying to illustrate ‘hegemony’ with examples of middle-school pimple-problems (this actually happened to me).
Most of my classes in graduate school were ridiculous. Exams, other lectures, etc., weren’t but I also didn’t really need to write so many research papers, had plenty of skills; needed to read more freely and write more in field. But for students with less experience than I already had, and at schools where the general context of things is less rich, class becomes really important, I’ve learned.