Never judge a book by its' cover.
When I was first at University I wasn't the hardest working student in my year. Far from it. But I was and still am very bright. In the first year I hated going to lectures because they were always held in the mornings between 9am and 12pm and I rarely got up before 11 in the morning anyway. I read the textbooks and used to obtain the lecture notes in another way.
Every week we would be given a list of questions to be answered as part of our course work. One of the courses I attended was physical chemistry and many of the problems given to us required a good knowledge of mathematics and a quick mind. These characteristics appeared to be lacking in many of my classmates who slavishly sat and took lecture notes without really understanding much of the information being provided. They certainly didn't have much chance to answer some of the more complex problems in thermodynamics given to them.
The course work had to be finished and handed in by Monday at 5pm. Every Friday night my mate Paul and I would sit in the pub, have a few beers, and work out the answers on the back of beermats. We would the each prepare our own hard copies over the weekend, and then each week one lucky individual would be offered the solutions to the questions in return for their previous weeks lecture notes. These would be taken away and photocopied.
This worked well until the end of the first term when Paul and I came top in just about everything without "apparently" any effort. This was not true of course because we worked differently and did do some work mainly in the afternoons and the early hours of the morning after the pubs had shut.
After that folk stopped giving us their notes and the expedient of Paul attending half the morning lectures and me attending the other half had to be taken.
Thinking back, we weren't the nicest people. One of the tricks we used to play was conducted when waiting to go into an examination room. You will remember it is common for a crowds of people to gather in the twenty minutes or so before an examination room is opened. During this time, many people can be seen frantically going through their notes or textbooks trying to cram a few extra facts in.
Paul and I would select our target, and then in a voice just loud enough for him or her to hear, discuss the high likelihood of something we hadn't studied appearing in the examination. This would inevitably provoke a hurried fumbling through a book by a flustered individual and cause even more agitation than they were normally feeling. We always chose a nice, complicated topic that nobody could begin to remember in the five minutes remaining before the exam started. Maybe derivation of the Nernst equation or something similar.
The next step in illustrating our superiority over the rest of the class was to appear as cool as possible under the pressure of the examination process. Once I had taken my seat and before I started to read the examination paper when permission had been given to start, whilst the majority would hurriedly read the paper, I would open the case containing my pens, pencils, and erasers and take out a plastic bag containing miniature bottles and ice cubes and prepare myself a whisky and coke and only then "read the rubric."
And before you question how anybody can drink alcohol in an examination room, at the university I attended there was a university statute stating anybody could ask for a glass of sherry to be provided: although I don't think this had happened for many years.
Unsurprisingly Paul and I were not too popular with some of our classmates who worked harder than we did with less success.
Amongst my peers was a young lady called Elizabeth. She was a typical swot. She was good looking enough in a plain sort of way, but didn't wear much make up, had glasses, and always looked tired, presumably because she was always in the library.
I never saw her in the library myself of course because I rarely visited it. Indeed, in my first year, when I took a group of final year school students considering an application to the university physics course on a departmental tour, I couldn't immediately remember which floor the library was to be found on.
I had always assumed that Elizabeth didn't like me but thinking back she and I did not move in the same circles. She always sat at the front of the lecture theatre whist I always at sat at the back. I never saw her in the pub or at a disco, and whilst I would frequent the student's union and have a coffee and a cigarette I never saw her there either. In three years at University, I never spoke to her once.
