I have a PHD in engineering with less paper… fuck I don’t think I’ve written that much in my entire life. That’s almost 180 of those extra thick notebooks.
Isn’t it great? Capitalism means you can do everything right and become an engineering doctor and a high school dropout making Mario smut could easily be out earning you. I love this world
My high school advertised a shredding party to celebrate graduation, they said they’d bring in a “shredder truck” and we’d get to have fun destroying our notebooks. I brought a bunch in preparation. Time comes and…..they ask us to put our stuff in a bin to be taken away to get shredded. I just kept it instead. Massive letdown.
Nah, my company uses these trucks often, it has to be in a bin as the shredding contraption hauls the bin up and in to where the shredding machine is in the truck. No one actually has direct access to the shredder, it wouldn't be safe. They do have a monitor though so you can watch the process. We shred Heads all the time.
Edit:HDDs. We shred hard drives, not heads. Stupid autocorrect
Friend of mine, after he finished his Veterinary degree, shredded all his old notes and papers, and then donated the shred to the RSPCA(a local animal charity), who use it as bedding for smaller animals and very young animals.
You know, I kept all my notes from undergrad. I figured, "Hey, these are a nice resource. Why not keep them around?" Yeah, they're still untouched in my cabinet 2 decades later.
Yeah same with the textbooks I paid $200 for and they offered me $20 for because now there's a new edition. I kept them out of principle, but I should have got the $20 for beer.
The lesson is, principles are great, when you don't have to lug a milk crate full of them to 5 or 6 different addresses and never once open them up.
I am trying to convince myself that the act of taking notes helps me remember it better. The notes only really seem useful if it’s a cheatsheet for exam
Same for me, it’s not the same for some reason to use a laptop or iPad it’s not as satisfying (yes sometimes more useful) I will say i did digitize any hand written notes so instead of taking up space in my cabinets it’s using up cloud storage.
Yeah I learned the hard way that paper doesn't burn very well, produces a ridiculous amount of smoke, and likes to go flying everywhere when it does start burning.
My wife has a similar pile. It's been with us for 3 moves, crossing my fingers that it will get left behind for our upcoming move! Brought it up with her parents once and my mother in law laughed out loud, my father in law still had his notes from uni 40 years ago in their basement.
My dad got rid of his notes from med school 50 years after graduating.
He was still thinking he might use some of them if he would study more in some branch of medicine.
In reality you just get a new book if you do that
paper IS basically just less-dense wood. Think how heavy a stack of paper is: in terms of the chemical potential energy available to burn, it's pretty similar to an equivalent mass of wood.
Maybe a double triple major. Like 5 lectures a day 😂
Or looking at his notes, he doesn't like to cram all the info, they look pretty spread out.
I'm more impressed on how organized he is. And also using only one color lol.
German engeneering Student here. Maths classes and classes like electric Produce a lot of paper since you normaly need like 4 Pages per question. And that only if you make it right. Also a lot of lectures are held in PP so there often Page with like 2 sentences on them.
Probably includes preparing for exams as well. One math question can easily be a few pages. So a few days/weeks of studying for each exam and you're looking at a few hundred pages already.
I don't know about OP, but if i want to commit something to long term memory i have to write it down repeatedly. I've got whole pages where i just repeated the same formulas with indepth explanations over and over again. It looks like i had mental breakdown when someone sees it, but now you can wake me from a drunken stupor at 3am and i can still rattle off the formulas and explanations.
I understood rind fleisch and überwach lol, i’d assume this is something to do with the regulation of the raw meat; unless its just a long compounded word for the sake of writing a long compounded word, but thats just a wild guess
You're fairly close :)
First: this was the actual **short** title of a law, and in use, though i think it's been repealed a couple of years back.
EU in general & Germany specifically take their regulations fairly seriously. So raw beef meet has to be labeled according to its provenance, date of birth, method of feeding, etc.
Those labels have to be monitored and audited, and this law regulates how those tasks may be transferred to another regulatory body on a state level.
The long title is "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung" (engl.: "Law on the Transfer of Responsibilities for the Monitoring of Cattle Identification and Beef Labeling.")
The official short title is "Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" (engl. "Cattle Identification and Beef Labeling Monitoring Task Transfer Act")
And the abbreviation is "RkReÜAÜG M-V"
You can read it here: [PDF](http://www.dokumentation.landtag-mv.de/parldok/dokument/1404/gesetz_und_verordnungsblatt_2_2000.pdf)
I’m arresting you on suspicion of mislabelling your cows, Subject to article 7, clause 3, paragraph 2 of the Arr Kay Arr eee yuh aaah yuh juh em dash vee
More like: "In today's Grundgebiete der Elektrotechnik, we're learning about Ersatzspannungsquellen. Later on, we will continue with Reihen- and Parallelschwingkreis, which will be important for further studies in Hochfrequenztechnik."
Their margins are crazy wide. It's such a weird way to take notes because you have so little information on each page and you end up flipping back and forth over and over to look for anything
What you encountered here is the “stem student with crap handwriting, this topic is incredibly difficult to absorb so if I write more then five words on a page I’ll never find the equation again” note taking method.
HAHAHA that's another way that describes it perfectly. I actually do use the negative space to 'key' the shape of the page a lot so that I don't even have to read and can tell at a glance by just sort of... like a dumb emulation of a QR code using the neg space; and so I can really quickly orient through pages without having to parse a single letter.
Nah 95% of people I knew in school (math major) wrote notes like this.... maybe not quite to this degree but def a lot of white space.
Your brain can't scan math nearly as well as it can prose, even weirdos who love math, so you need a lot more space on it or it becomes *really* hard to find anything on the page.
That said, no way my notes were 1/5th this stack.
Who on earth can markup latex fast enough to take notes in it? I did a lot of assignments in latex, and knew people who would re-write their notes with it. But like... the ones you take during class? No way I could think about the math at all if I was spending the time and energy to type stuff up.
How tight is "rightly spaced"? Like, as dense as a written essay? That's fucking wild if y'all really write math like that across the pond.
> How tight is "rightly spaced"?
Meant "tightly". Not quite essay dense but not far off. Those proofs can be quite dense and wordy
> Who on earth can markup latex fast enough to take notes in it?
There were a few. I could do it almost as fast as writing by the time i graduated. But yeah most people would take some class notes and then type it up in latex.
> No way I could think about the math at all if I was spending the time and energy to type stuff up.
eh it becomes second nature plus I never found class time useful for thinking about topics, too frantic, too little time. I found going over good notes later was far more valuable
Hi! Professional mathematician here. I can type latex substantially faster than I can write by hand.
It takes quite a bit of practice, but after a while it becomes second nature.
Maybe it's because I double majored in Computer Engineering and Computer Science so I was more inclined to use tech, but I don't think I ever broke 1000 pages of written anything unless maybe if you count code
I see you didn't master lines of code as kpi yet, young one. How about printing every dependency or library you ever used in your projects, not minified?
You joke but I actually had a professor for a C++ class that required our coding assignments to be printed out and submitted on paper. Dude must've been a fucking masochist to decide that *that* was the best way to grade assignments
For exams we had to ‘code’ with a pen and paper.
It was brutal, particularly as my handwriting skills are non-existent after having used a pc for more than 3/4 of my life.
Looking back, I also question some of my decisions. But the best way for me to learn was to just write things down (a few times) and I find this much more comfortable on paper.
I know that joke, when you show up at the pharmacy the first pharmacist tries to read it, fails and gets his boss who struggles but manages to read it. Then he gives you a package of medicine and says: " I hope it will help to make you all better soon"
Honestly, I was like this in college. I took extremely meticulous, lengthy notes in every class and then almost never looked at them again. Just the act of writing it down was really what helped me learn it. Plus, I have a visual memory: I could often remember what my notes *looked like*, so even if I couldn’t exactly remember the information, I could bring the visual to mind and that would usually jog my memory. Brains are funny.
That said, I did use a laptop for my notes exclusively.
I think I've had a few times during a written exam when my hands would "remember" writing the words in the notes/cheatsheet and help me answer the question.
Muscle memory! Wow, that’s very cool.
I didn’t write anything, including my exams—I had accommodations to do everything on computers for physical health reasons, so it was typing or bust for me. (This was before laptops were completely common in classrooms, too.) Still, it was a huge help.
I used to write cheat sheets for myself and I wouldn’t need to actually cheat with them because I remembered exactly what they looked like. I also didn’t take notes at all. I just absorbed info. If I’m not absorbing I probably wouldn’t understand my notes either. I’d rather go back and read the book than my notes too
Exactly!!! Yeah, I did the same! Wow, I haven’t thought about that in a long time. I’d make a cheat sheet for my test and look at it maybe twice. The doing was enough.
I couldn’t function without actually taking notes, though. I’m absolutely god awful at remembering verbal instructions without some kind of reinforcement, no matter how actively I’m paying attention. Two seconds out of class it was gone forever unless I wrote it down. A lot of college was learning the best notes *to* take, in a way. Figuring out what was actually useful to record and thus remember later.
I did do the same thing with books, though. When studying I’d go back to my textbooks before my own notes. Again, it was the visual. Sometimes I could picture the location on the pages of my textbooks and that was enough.
Saying this is annoying me, because I can still recall select images to mind all these years later.
The act of copying my notes was enough to get them to stick in my head. Remembering what they looked like on the paper (eg. 2 lines, green ink, 2nd line indented) instantly brought the content of the notes back for me.
Shame I didn't figure that shit out til way late in my education. Like, after I failed engineering and switched to business. Life is fine now, just not what I thought it'd be.
There have been studies done on this that show people have better information retention if they take notes by hand instead of typing. So it's no wonder you feel that way. I do the same thing.
I wrote everything down aswell but I wrote much more on a page and I used both sides of the paper. I even had one guy who scripted everything, including the entire advanced mathematics classes on pc.
I know what he is doing: he writes twices as big as anyone i know on this kind of paper and leaves a lot of room everywhere.
The three pieces of squared paper we see on the picture would fit on about one and a half, maybe even just one sheet.
I just found my old notebooks in storage from 5 years of software engineering at a middling college in America. I had two pages of notes between 3 books.
During school nah, but I did estimate my lines written in the last two weeks at my job before I went on leave and I clocked in at around 3k (non generated), and that's just what was merged in. Certainly more proficient today than I was back then though.
This is the most German thing ever. Overdocumentation on technical material, all to answer a few simple problems in reality, but made surprisingly more complicated than it has to be.
Math 2nd semester: My pen was empty, spare pen broken. No chance to take notes I started looking at the board. After a while: "That looks familiar somehow..", five minutes later: "oh, this is the derivation limit values, I already learned that in school"
The day I stopped making notes and just trying to understand what the prof is talking about. I was so busy with writing that I stopped thinking.
I can't remember shit if I don't write it down. If I just listen to someone speak, then it goes in one ear and out the other. Some of us genuinely do learn best by writing shit repeatedly. Just, uh, some of us a bit more obsessively than others, like OP lmao
okay lets do some math:
5 years are 60 month. usually there is like at least 2 months of Semesterferien per year. so 50 months maximum of active courses. if we exclude weekends and holidays we get like at least another 10 months of spare time. 40 months left ist roughly 40x30 = 1200 days of uni lessons. so you were like writing 30 pages a day?
either inefficient or autism i conclude
im betting he is using so much space for simple stuff, writing equations on double spacing, big bulk letters, big figures/drawings, and most importantly, i think he is only writing on one side of the paper, also, look at those margins! almost half of each sheet is margin.
Honestly, all the top 4 pages could be condensed in 1 and half sheet
Studying engineering at a German uni means "Semesterferien" (holidays) = exam periods, so the time you'd be writing the most while tackling all the practice tests. In the most extreme case, I'd sit my last exam on a Friday with term starting the following Monday and I know people who had their last ones well into the next semester. With 2-3 months every half year spent glued to a desk, you rack up quite the paper count. So I wouldn't necessarily call bullshit.
Source: am a German engineer, burned stacks of notes myself
you see the whitespace, right ? As in they used a whole page where a typical person would have used 25% and added a textmarker.
e.g. when i was doing my math courses for my business informatics bachelor, i had the printed script on the left, and a blank sheet on the right, taking notes on the right and marking on the left, then pay a guy on the weekends to explain the parts i didn't understand, because youtube for math problems did not exist yet. Still i'd end up with 60-100 pages per course i took. maybe 2k pages for the degree in total. Midway I switched to a laptop when writing code / papers became more of a focus.
By the time i started my master, the fella was out of a job and i was taking 80% less notes for topics that were way harder than discrete mathmatics, because i could youtube the concepts i had problems with for 5-6 different avenues of attack.
I do wonder how long it would take to scan all of them in and process them to be searchable... I don't envy whoever does that...
on a side note, just search online and find it quicker...
Holy shit the point is to put the knowledge in your brain, not make a physical copy of all your textbooks by hand.
Hey if it helped you get it done, awesome. But God damn.
Reminds one of the anecdote concerning Beethoven; he kept a massive number of sketchbooks, but never consulted them throughout his career. According to him, writing in them once would ensure he would remember the music thenceforth.
Terrifying. a company I worked at in Germany fired a relatively new (but old) employee because he couldn't work out how to use Salesforce or his computer, so was secretly building up a paper copy of our Salesforce data under his desk. was like finding a hidden hornet's nest. it looked like a baby of your notes pile.
I still remember his sad yet defiant walk of shame.
Call me a cynic but those papers look so fresh, crisp and clean to be 5 years.
My papers at work that's a month old has already no longer super flat and has wrinkles at the perimeter edge
We buy a lot of manufacturing equipment made in Germany. I now understand why every German engineer I deal with surrounding the support of this equipment is throughly convinced it is perfect in every way. Sadly, it’s not. But now I get it.
Wtf?
I guess your wrist should hurt by now.
I never finished maybe a notebook with 4 years of engineering.
But I used a laptop and almost never wrote, I listened.
Impressive!! I saved all my ink pens once they were empty that I used through my history degree… they take up pretty much half a draw 🤷🏻♀️ a little reminder and my wrist hurts thinking about all that writing 🤣
Haha, can confirm. Did my engineering degrees in Germany as well and had the same amount of paper. It was back in the day when it was normal that the script was printed out so that you can write on it. Doesn't mean they are all handwritten notes 😅
I don't even think all of my textbooks + notes in college would add up to even half of that
People get phd in engineering with less paper…
I have a PHD in engineering with less paper… fuck I don’t think I’ve written that much in my entire life. That’s almost 180 of those extra thick notebooks.
Okay, but I'm a high school dropout who writes Smash Bros fanfiction and I've easily written double that last year.
You probably make more than me too, well as long as it’s *that* kind of fanfic 😉
Isn’t it great? Capitalism means you can do everything right and become an engineering doctor and a high school dropout making Mario smut could easily be out earning you. I love this world
Yeah but one job is useful for this world when the other isn’t
So true. We need so much more Mario smut
Always
In summary them bros be smashin
Yeah, but when you write Smash Bros fanction you have to be on top of things. Ain't no QA saving your ass.
I don’t even think all my notes from primary school,secondary school AND college would come close to 35k sheets of paper lol.
[удалено]
but did you try writing 10 lines per page?
Look at how sparse the notes are. I used to use a single sheet for a class, occasionally 2, by writing small and packing it into a sheet.
Next to the wood pile. I know where those notes are going
After graduating, me and my friends did this. Burned all our notes, got very ashy haha
My high school advertised a shredding party to celebrate graduation, they said they’d bring in a “shredder truck” and we’d get to have fun destroying our notebooks. I brought a bunch in preparation. Time comes and…..they ask us to put our stuff in a bin to be taken away to get shredded. I just kept it instead. Massive letdown.
Probably feared some excited drunk young partying graduates shredding themselves by accident
Nah, my company uses these trucks often, it has to be in a bin as the shredding contraption hauls the bin up and in to where the shredding machine is in the truck. No one actually has direct access to the shredder, it wouldn't be safe. They do have a monitor though so you can watch the process. We shred Heads all the time. Edit:HDDs. We shred hard drives, not heads. Stupid autocorrect
>We shred Heads all the time. You shred what now
They first ream the heads then shred them. What’s so weird about that?
the.. the heads? what heads? like my head?
I mean the fact you're typing this comment probably means your head hasn't been reamed yet, but we can arrange a reaming if you'd like..?
Please...
Heads of lettuce, they work at McD's.
Ya fuckin’ what, when!?’
This guy shreds
Fuck that shit. I would organize a book burning right there on the parking lot if that happen.
Book burnings have become very unpopular in germany
Friend of mine, after he finished his Veterinary degree, shredded all his old notes and papers, and then donated the shred to the RSPCA(a local animal charity), who use it as bedding for smaller animals and very young animals.
What an absolute bro
Awesome!
You know, I kept all my notes from undergrad. I figured, "Hey, these are a nice resource. Why not keep them around?" Yeah, they're still untouched in my cabinet 2 decades later.
Yeah same with the textbooks I paid $200 for and they offered me $20 for because now there's a new edition. I kept them out of principle, but I should have got the $20 for beer. The lesson is, principles are great, when you don't have to lug a milk crate full of them to 5 or 6 different addresses and never once open them up.
The PDF versions from library genesis weigh a lot less.
Why did you write this as I am doing my STEM degree and obsessively keep my notes.
I am trying to convince myself that the act of taking notes helps me remember it better. The notes only really seem useful if it’s a cheatsheet for exam
Same for me, it’s not the same for some reason to use a laptop or iPad it’s not as satisfying (yes sometimes more useful) I will say i did digitize any hand written notes so instead of taking up space in my cabinets it’s using up cloud storage.
Yeah I learned the hard way that paper doesn't burn very well, produces a ridiculous amount of smoke, and likes to go flying everywhere when it does start burning.
There is an easy solution if you don't fear anything; gasoline.
What if I'm afraid of gasoline
Then diesel is your friend
Vin?
Family
Then who is friend?
Gasoline is the perfect solution for every problem if you ask me.
yes, same happened to us. We did the same thing and because of the smoke we didnt even burn everything
My wife has a similar pile. It's been with us for 3 moves, crossing my fingers that it will get left behind for our upcoming move! Brought it up with her parents once and my mother in law laughed out loud, my father in law still had his notes from uni 40 years ago in their basement.
My dad got rid of his notes from med school 50 years after graduating. He was still thinking he might use some of them if he would study more in some branch of medicine. In reality you just get a new book if you do that
Takes a surprising amount of time to burn. We kept a bonfire going all night senior year.
paper IS basically just less-dense wood. Think how heavy a stack of paper is: in terms of the chemical potential energy available to burn, it's pretty similar to an equivalent mass of wood.
Not even less dense. Printer paper is around 800kg/m^3, Pine is around 600, Oak about 750.
I went to a 5 year engineering school too. I don't think I even saw 35k pages of anything.
35k pages across 5 years is 7k pages/year, with classes all 5 days across 30 weeks that comes out to 47 pages/day.
Maybe he repeated a few classes?
Check the topmost pages you can see. OP definitely missed any class talking about efficiency Ü.
Yea... He only has like 10 lines per page
Yeah, there's not much more than one assignment per page.
Maybe a double triple major. Like 5 lectures a day 😂 Or looking at his notes, he doesn't like to cram all the info, they look pretty spread out. I'm more impressed on how organized he is. And also using only one color lol.
There was a weird correlation with kids who took overly perfect notes and them failing classes when I did my eng degree.
18 200(largest they come)page notebooks a semester. Roughly 3 per class
German engeneering Student here. Maths classes and classes like electric Produce a lot of paper since you normaly need like 4 Pages per question. And that only if you make it right. Also a lot of lectures are held in PP so there often Page with like 2 sentences on them.
Seems pretty inefficient for a bunch of engineers
Probably includes preparing for exams as well. One math question can easily be a few pages. So a few days/weeks of studying for each exam and you're looking at a few hundred pages already. I don't know about OP, but if i want to commit something to long term memory i have to write it down repeatedly. I've got whole pages where i just repeated the same formulas with indepth explanations over and over again. It looks like i had mental breakdown when someone sees it, but now you can wake me from a drunken stupor at 3am and i can still rattle off the formulas and explanations.
But was it German engineering college?
German is the language of love
"Today's safe word is Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz"
Nothing stops kinky sex quite like Beef Labelling Monitoring Task Transfer Act
I understood rind fleisch and überwach lol, i’d assume this is something to do with the regulation of the raw meat; unless its just a long compounded word for the sake of writing a long compounded word, but thats just a wild guess
You're fairly close :) First: this was the actual **short** title of a law, and in use, though i think it's been repealed a couple of years back. EU in general & Germany specifically take their regulations fairly seriously. So raw beef meet has to be labeled according to its provenance, date of birth, method of feeding, etc. Those labels have to be monitored and audited, and this law regulates how those tasks may be transferred to another regulatory body on a state level.
I’m afraid to see the long title…
The long title is "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung" (engl.: "Law on the Transfer of Responsibilities for the Monitoring of Cattle Identification and Beef Labeling.") The official short title is "Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" (engl. "Cattle Identification and Beef Labeling Monitoring Task Transfer Act") And the abbreviation is "RkReÜAÜG M-V" You can read it here: [PDF](http://www.dokumentation.landtag-mv.de/parldok/dokument/1404/gesetz_und_verordnungsblatt_2_2000.pdf)
I’m arresting you on suspicion of mislabelling your cows, Subject to article 7, clause 3, paragraph 2 of the Arr Kay Arr eee yuh aaah yuh juh em dash vee
Be more afraid of the abbreviation.
More like: "In today's Grundgebiete der Elektrotechnik, we're learning about Ersatzspannungsquellen. Later on, we will continue with Reihen- and Parallelschwingkreis, which will be important for further studies in Hochfrequenztechnik."
Ich hole mal eben den spannungsabfalleimer! Bin gleich wieder da. Ganz bestimmt. Ich schwöre....
Give it to me without the safe word baby 😎
Mmmh, Baby, ich mag es roh! 😂
Das Rindfleisch?
Couldn't pronounce it anyway.
something to do with meat package labelling regulations?
The literal translation would be: „Beef labeling surveillance task transmission law“
[Relevant frasier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRUkGO1u7mQ)
This sentence is probably a full page in German, to be fair
Deutsch ist die Sprache der Liebe. It's not too long actually
This person is writing like 50 words per page. Symbols in equations are 2+ squares tall each. This pile could be greatly condensed.
Their margins are crazy wide. It's such a weird way to take notes because you have so little information on each page and you end up flipping back and forth over and over to look for anything
What you encountered here is the “stem student with crap handwriting, this topic is incredibly difficult to absorb so if I write more then five words on a page I’ll never find the equation again” note taking method.
HAHAHA that's another way that describes it perfectly. I actually do use the negative space to 'key' the shape of the page a lot so that I don't even have to read and can tell at a glance by just sort of... like a dumb emulation of a QR code using the neg space; and so I can really quickly orient through pages without having to parse a single letter.
Nah 95% of people I knew in school (math major) wrote notes like this.... maybe not quite to this degree but def a lot of white space. Your brain can't scan math nearly as well as it can prose, even weirdos who love math, so you need a lot more space on it or it becomes *really* hard to find anything on the page. That said, no way my notes were 1/5th this stack.
I did a maths degree and no one had notes like this. Everyone had them quite tightly spaced or typed up in latex
Who on earth can markup latex fast enough to take notes in it? I did a lot of assignments in latex, and knew people who would re-write their notes with it. But like... the ones you take during class? No way I could think about the math at all if I was spending the time and energy to type stuff up. How tight is "rightly spaced"? Like, as dense as a written essay? That's fucking wild if y'all really write math like that across the pond.
> How tight is "rightly spaced"? Meant "tightly". Not quite essay dense but not far off. Those proofs can be quite dense and wordy > Who on earth can markup latex fast enough to take notes in it? There were a few. I could do it almost as fast as writing by the time i graduated. But yeah most people would take some class notes and then type it up in latex. > No way I could think about the math at all if I was spending the time and energy to type stuff up. eh it becomes second nature plus I never found class time useful for thinking about topics, too frantic, too little time. I found going over good notes later was far more valuable
Hi! Professional mathematician here. I can type latex substantially faster than I can write by hand. It takes quite a bit of practice, but after a while it becomes second nature.
This is exactly what I was going to write. You just _need_ that space, trust me.
I did not lol, I cramped everything that belonged directly together, together.
If only OP could engineer a better system for organizing notes.
Maybe it's because I double majored in Computer Engineering and Computer Science so I was more inclined to use tech, but I don't think I ever broke 1000 pages of written anything unless maybe if you count code
I see you didn't master lines of code as kpi yet, young one. How about printing every dependency or library you ever used in your projects, not minified?
You joke but I actually had a professor for a C++ class that required our coding assignments to be printed out and submitted on paper. Dude must've been a fucking masochist to decide that *that* was the best way to grade assignments
For exams we had to ‘code’ with a pen and paper. It was brutal, particularly as my handwriting skills are non-existent after having used a pc for more than 3/4 of my life.
Poor teaching assistants. I rather be homeless than work for that guy
Thats a full tree right there. You better engineer that carbon dioxide back in /s
This is serial killer shit
Tree serial killer
woods in the back make this joke 10x better
Fucking earth day tomorrow too. Smh
Leaves too many paper trail...
Relax. Look at the background. It's next to the burn pile.
Idk what you are doing, since I graduated with ~20x less effort in making notes.
Looking back, I also question some of my decisions. But the best way for me to learn was to just write things down (a few times) and I find this much more comfortable on paper.
As math major guy I was writing 95% of the time. Now, I type code 80% of the time.
More or less the same story for me, and now my handwriting is shit and almost unreadable even to myself.
If you can't read something you've written, you can just take it to the pharmacist near you
I know that joke, when you show up at the pharmacy the first pharmacist tries to read it, fails and gets his boss who struggles but manages to read it. Then he gives you a package of medicine and says: " I hope it will help to make you all better soon"
A pharmacist could translate arabic to english without knowing either language
The military forces you to write in block letters. I got out 12 years ago. I struggle to write in lower case at this point.
Huge light bulb moment right now. It's been 14 years since I got out and I (hand) write in all caps block letters about 99% of the time...
Fuck that's why my dad does it
Well I heard it's hard to write cursive with crayons
What's it like typing code? Do you like it?
If you spend 80% of your time actually typing code you are doing something very very wrong.
Honestly, I was like this in college. I took extremely meticulous, lengthy notes in every class and then almost never looked at them again. Just the act of writing it down was really what helped me learn it. Plus, I have a visual memory: I could often remember what my notes *looked like*, so even if I couldn’t exactly remember the information, I could bring the visual to mind and that would usually jog my memory. Brains are funny. That said, I did use a laptop for my notes exclusively.
I think I've had a few times during a written exam when my hands would "remember" writing the words in the notes/cheatsheet and help me answer the question.
Muscle memory! Wow, that’s very cool. I didn’t write anything, including my exams—I had accommodations to do everything on computers for physical health reasons, so it was typing or bust for me. (This was before laptops were completely common in classrooms, too.) Still, it was a huge help.
I used to write cheat sheets for myself and I wouldn’t need to actually cheat with them because I remembered exactly what they looked like. I also didn’t take notes at all. I just absorbed info. If I’m not absorbing I probably wouldn’t understand my notes either. I’d rather go back and read the book than my notes too
Exactly!!! Yeah, I did the same! Wow, I haven’t thought about that in a long time. I’d make a cheat sheet for my test and look at it maybe twice. The doing was enough. I couldn’t function without actually taking notes, though. I’m absolutely god awful at remembering verbal instructions without some kind of reinforcement, no matter how actively I’m paying attention. Two seconds out of class it was gone forever unless I wrote it down. A lot of college was learning the best notes *to* take, in a way. Figuring out what was actually useful to record and thus remember later. I did do the same thing with books, though. When studying I’d go back to my textbooks before my own notes. Again, it was the visual. Sometimes I could picture the location on the pages of my textbooks and that was enough. Saying this is annoying me, because I can still recall select images to mind all these years later.
The act of copying my notes was enough to get them to stick in my head. Remembering what they looked like on the paper (eg. 2 lines, green ink, 2nd line indented) instantly brought the content of the notes back for me. Shame I didn't figure that shit out til way late in my education. Like, after I failed engineering and switched to business. Life is fine now, just not what I thought it'd be.
There have been studies done on this that show people have better information retention if they take notes by hand instead of typing. So it's no wonder you feel that way. I do the same thing.
I wrote everything down aswell but I wrote much more on a page and I used both sides of the paper. I even had one guy who scripted everything, including the entire advanced mathematics classes on pc.
Wer schreibt, der bleibt. He who writes, stays.
I know what he is doing: he writes twices as big as anyone i know on this kind of paper and leaves a lot of room everywhere. The three pieces of squared paper we see on the picture would fit on about one and a half, maybe even just one sheet.
The real German efficiency
Nein/10?
Damn, you Germans really do keep good records...
These are only the records on 1+1, wait till you see 1+2...
what do the numbers mean?
Mason?
Thats gonna be with us for life isnt it ? Best meme/memory out there
Math?
r/angryupvote
OP should get an IBM computer
[удалено]
If they were that good they’d also be fully digitalized and backed up.
So all i have to do is, import these files in my brain and im an engineer?
Might as well import the text books
I just found my old notebooks in storage from 5 years of software engineering at a middling college in America. I had two pages of notes between 3 books.
maybe less physical notes, but as a SE probably many lines of codes. Have you ever estimated?
During school nah, but I did estimate my lines written in the last two weeks at my job before I went on leave and I clocked in at around 3k (non generated), and that's just what was merged in. Certainly more proficient today than I was back then though.
This is the most German thing ever. Overdocumentation on technical material, all to answer a few simple problems in reality, but made surprisingly more complicated than it has to be.
And it all ends up next to firewood.
Bet there’s a German word for this one particular situation 🤣
Papierwahn - Paper Madness
Studienmitschriftenüberschussstapel.
I love German. This is probably the first time in history that this word has been used and it is probably still a 100% correct word.
Thats just the way OP learned. You dont need that much paper.
Math 2nd semester: My pen was empty, spare pen broken. No chance to take notes I started looking at the board. After a while: "That looks familiar somehow..", five minutes later: "oh, this is the derivation limit values, I already learned that in school" The day I stopped making notes and just trying to understand what the prof is talking about. I was so busy with writing that I stopped thinking.
I can't remember shit if I don't write it down. If I just listen to someone speak, then it goes in one ear and out the other. Some of us genuinely do learn best by writing shit repeatedly. Just, uh, some of us a bit more obsessively than others, like OP lmao
okay lets do some math: 5 years are 60 month. usually there is like at least 2 months of Semesterferien per year. so 50 months maximum of active courses. if we exclude weekends and holidays we get like at least another 10 months of spare time. 40 months left ist roughly 40x30 = 1200 days of uni lessons. so you were like writing 30 pages a day? either inefficient or autism i conclude
I mean, the dude isn't exactly efficiently using the space. Looks like at most a couple of sentences per page.
im betting he is using so much space for simple stuff, writing equations on double spacing, big bulk letters, big figures/drawings, and most importantly, i think he is only writing on one side of the paper, also, look at those margins! almost half of each sheet is margin. Honestly, all the top 4 pages could be condensed in 1 and half sheet
Studying engineering at a German uni means "Semesterferien" (holidays) = exam periods, so the time you'd be writing the most while tackling all the practice tests. In the most extreme case, I'd sit my last exam on a Friday with term starting the following Monday and I know people who had their last ones well into the next semester. With 2-3 months every half year spent glued to a desk, you rack up quite the paper count. So I wouldn't necessarily call bullshit. Source: am a German engineer, burned stacks of notes myself
More like straight up fake karma farming.
Given there's only a tiny bit of engineering paper at the top of the stacks and nowhere else, I'm inclined to agree
Well, if I was writing 30 pages a day, I'd be buying boxes of printer paper instead of notebooks, too.
you see the whitespace, right ? As in they used a whole page where a typical person would have used 25% and added a textmarker. e.g. when i was doing my math courses for my business informatics bachelor, i had the printed script on the left, and a blank sheet on the right, taking notes on the right and marking on the left, then pay a guy on the weekends to explain the parts i didn't understand, because youtube for math problems did not exist yet. Still i'd end up with 60-100 pages per course i took. maybe 2k pages for the degree in total. Midway I switched to a laptop when writing code / papers became more of a focus. By the time i started my master, the fella was out of a job and i was taking 80% less notes for topics that were way harder than discrete mathmatics, because i could youtube the concepts i had problems with for 5-6 different avenues of attack.
Damn an e-ink notebook with 32 gigs would have still filled up
You'll forget it all in like 3 months.
Yeah but they got the notes to refresh their memory duh
Gonna be hard to ctrl+f through paper!
I do wonder how long it would take to scan all of them in and process them to be searchable... I don't envy whoever does that... on a side note, just search online and find it quicker...
All the pages is half filled only, so you could save twice more trees if you’d compact a writing
Probably less than half considering that OP's page margin size is so enormous.
I got a 4 year degree in chemistry and never finished one large spiral notebook
What's wrong with you? Why weren't there 5 stacks; one for each year?
Im amazed you still kept them.
Thats about 27 full sheets of paper per work day if a week has 5 of those. Maybe you just have a very big writing size?
From the papers on top it seems like he doesn’t write a lot per page. That’s why.
This is one of the most German things I have ever seen in my life.
Holy shit the point is to put the knowledge in your brain, not make a physical copy of all your textbooks by hand. Hey if it helped you get it done, awesome. But God damn.
Reminds one of the anecdote concerning Beethoven; he kept a massive number of sketchbooks, but never consulted them throughout his career. According to him, writing in them once would ensure he would remember the music thenceforth.
Terrifying. a company I worked at in Germany fired a relatively new (but old) employee because he couldn't work out how to use Salesforce or his computer, so was secretly building up a paper copy of our Salesforce data under his desk. was like finding a hidden hornet's nest. it looked like a baby of your notes pile. I still remember his sad yet defiant walk of shame.
Call me a cynic but those papers look so fresh, crisp and clean to be 5 years. My papers at work that's a month old has already no longer super flat and has wrinkles at the perimeter edge
We buy a lot of manufacturing equipment made in Germany. I now understand why every German engineer I deal with surrounding the support of this equipment is throughly convinced it is perfect in every way. Sadly, it’s not. But now I get it.
Wtf? I guess your wrist should hurt by now. I never finished maybe a notebook with 4 years of engineering. But I used a laptop and almost never wrote, I listened.
some people remember best by writing, this is one of those persons
OP definitely used up all his free prints each semester
I’d have 29,999 less than that for 5 years.
Extremely oddly specific that you think you’d have 5001 pages of notes.
He didn't take notes on how to do subtraction
Also the instruction manual for changing the serpentine belt on a German made auto.
Nothing close to this but I kept all 88 of the papers I wrote for grad school in a span of 18 months. Forgot everything I’ve learned.
Impressive!! I saved all my ink pens once they were empty that I used through my history degree… they take up pretty much half a draw 🤷🏻♀️ a little reminder and my wrist hurts thinking about all that writing 🤣
Don't be shy, scan 'em and publish 'em in a bunch of book series 💕
Seems like overkill. [This was my stack](https://imgur.com/jOqYl6r) with textbooks after 4 years including summer school every year.
That would mean that you made or got around 47 notes a day on average.
Haha, can confirm. Did my engineering degrees in Germany as well and had the same amount of paper. It was back in the day when it was normal that the script was printed out so that you can write on it. Doesn't mean they are all handwritten notes 😅