Nico Perrino

Study Tables: It’s one thing every Freshman athlete at Indiana gets to look forward to. A loud -often crowded- room. Late nights. The suffocating feeling of knowing you have one day left to get 6 study table hours in because you’ve been neglecting them all week. It’s something all of us feel or have felt. For those of you who are unfamiliar with study tables, they are required athletic study halls, done at your own pace, at whatever time your available (during the 8am-10pm hours of course), in the academic center within assembly hall. Every athlete is required to get a certain amount of study table hours in during the week, and that number is usually set by the coach (some teams -such as football- have team study table periods where the whole football team meets at one time).

Study tables are mandatory to encourage good study habits for incoming student-athletes and they are also used to help students make the adjustment from high school to college. If you get a 3.0 your first semester, you are done, but if not, you are subjected to yet another semester of study tables until you make grade.

For those of us who come into college good students study tables can sometimes be quite the hassle. For 1) You are forced to do the hours at a specific location (at least you were when I was a freshman) and this could often be very inconvenient and not conducive to effective studying. Not only can study tables -especially at night- be loud (that’s what happens when you have 40 athletes in the same room), but when it’s 10 degrees below zero outside, dark, and you have to walk 15 minutes from your dorm to get there, you often wonder what you signed up for.

For me I liked to do my studying at my dorm, and that is where I usually did it. So when I would be forced to get my hours in I would usually go and end up plugging a dvd into my computer and watching it, or read a book or serf the web. Usually something that was not studying.

However, I did have a friend on the soccer team that thought study tables were great and were a big part of why he received great grades his first semester. Even though he got a 3.0, and was effectively done with study tables, he gave himself study table hours anyway to force himself to study.

These days, however, when I’m not forced to be at study tables, I sometimes come anyway because it’s a convenient place to study before or after practice. As I speak, actually, I’m sitting at study tables, writing this blog, and hoping to get out of here before memories of first semester freshman year creep back and alienate me from this place forever.

See ya!