Studying shouldn't require stimulants

This past weekend, I traveled to an upstate New York institution of higher learning with the intention of reconnecting with a couple of buddies from high school and rediscovering the building blocks of a college party: campus girls and boatloads of lukewarm beer inside a ramshackle building. As Saturday morning crept into the legendary frat house, the brothers slowly emerged from their secret lairs after indulging in yet another night of inexpensive vodka and deafening techno music. They filled the hallways with war stories of the night before, reminiscing about scrambling to the bathroom after one shot too many or the brother who woke up at 5 a.m. with a girl he didn't know in a building he didn't know existed. Amid the fraternal camaraderie and the stench of stale beer, a chorus of "Shit dude, I have to go study" rang out. Within 10 minutes, there was enough Adderall and Five-Hour Energy bottles to supply an entire ADD ward.

It looked like a Duane Reade gone wrong. Adderall magically morphed into a line of powder on an old Eminem CD. In a matter of seconds, pills of all shapes and sizes were flying around everywhere. One could only ask himself: What happened to the good old days of grabbing your backpack and heading over the library for a natural day of studying? For these kids, doing schoolwork has become a frantic effort to pump their brains so full of narcotics and other forms of artificial stimulation that studying is now more of a drug-induced ritual than a natural function of being in college.

Is it like this at every school, for every student? Absolutely not. This is clearly an outlying group of kids, influenced by a culture of self-medication and constant stimulation. It's worth asking, though: How many of us can admit to just not being able to study sober anymore?
A cup of coffee, some background music — the words in the textbook just won't cut it. We need that little extra push to get us through those mundane afternoons at the library when we are thinking of 20 other things we'd rather be doing instead.

Is it a distraction? Yes, distractions grant us a reprieve from the tedium of that five-page literary response we've been dreading the whole weekend. Without some added mental stimulation, how many of us can honestly say they can stay glued to their work for hours on end? I'm guessing not too many, and that's why you'll find more coffee and headphones in Bobst than at Starbucks or Best Buy.

It's anything but the work, while the work sits out in front of you.

The situation from last weekend may be a bit of an extreme, but it's no less indicative about the state of studying today. iTunes and hyper-caffeination are the best friends we have when "Pride and Prejudice" is lying on the desk in front of us, demanding to be read.

It's tough to blame our concentration problem on boring assignments alone, but that's definitely a part of it. The nature of the work hasn't changed so much from 20 or 30 years ago, but I don't think any of us would complain if some of our schoolwork were jazzed up a bit so we could concentrate more on the task at hand and less on finding a suitable distraction.

And the expectations aren't helping either. I'm not sure I have the energy tonight to keep my family's dream of a doctorate, an MBA and an MFA alive. So while I sit here staring at the wall and questioning my motivation for the umpteenth straight night, I think back to the Adderall and Red Bull binges I witnessed last weekend. Maybe I'm not so different from them.