How to study at a coffee shop
- Spend 20 minutes deciding where to go. Make a pro-con list of which place has good wifi, best coffee, best people watching.
- Decide on your outfit. Are you gonna go academic chic? Like are you a disheveled writer or a chic intellectual? Or are you just gonna throw on athleisure because you hate pants pressing up against your stomach?
- Pack your bag. What books will you need? How many pens? A snack maybe? Walk out your door to the car and realize you forgot a book you need. Go back to house and get book.
- Get to the place. Your favorite place is taken up by someone and you curse them and hope the floor will swallow them up.
- Order your coffee, trying to get the most flavorful thing without spending the most money (“Can I have regular coffee, but with the syrup? And non-steamed milk?”)
- Sit down at a less than desired place. Spend most of your time glaring at everyone who has the good seats. Finally, you’ve opened all the documents you need and have set up a space.
- Your favorite table is finally open! Lunge for it and grab all your stuff like a madwoman to claim the seat.
- Oops, your laptop went to sleep mode. Open all your files again.
- Open a blank Microsoft word page.
- Check facebook.
- Facebook message your group chat to complain about how you don’t want to do work.
- Eavesdrop on the couple next to you. Find out that they are breaking up. Livetweet their convo.
- Bathroom break.
- Remember an article you needed and go to the school library’s page to look it up. Get distracted by other articles that come up.
- Start outlining a whole new project on your new idea. Think about where you can submit it, start outlining a book proposal.
- Back to your original work. Fix the margins. Try out a new font.
- Write a new intro to your paper.
- Check your email, answer messages from your students and then complain to your group chat about how undergrads never follow directions.
- Check twitter for an hour.
- Write another page. Half of it is a block quote from a source.
- Google how to properly cite something. Check six different places to make sure you are correct.
- New couple sits down next to you and starts praising a movie you hate. Fight the urge to butt in.
- Write another page. Erase most of it then start again.
- Get back on the group chat to finish planning what you guys are doing that night.
- Need more coffee! Yay, free refills.
- Go back and read the assignment again. Realize you should be doing this a different way. Start over.
- Go to the bathroom again. Too much coffee!
- Write another page using the terms, “as is widely known. [INSERT PRIOR RESEARCH HERE]” and then forget to insert it
- Control F your paper and realize you’ve used the word “purport” eighteen times.
- Say hello to someone you marginally know from class who wants to make small talk but suddenly you HAVE to write this paper. Tell them so.
- Write briskly for 30 minutes straight.
- Leave because you are getting hungry.
Robin Hershkowitz, Ph.D. 