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Student Spotlight: Yufu "Hester" Huang
By Yuma Shuto
Hester has built her whole student life routine around one thing she can't change: three hours on the train. So, once at LUJ, she makes the most out of every day on campus. “If I’m here for only an hour and a half, it will be completely meaningless,” she says. “So I try to stay at school as long as possible.”
That means long days and an unusual rhythm. She usually skips lunch. She has gotten used to having just breakfast and dinner. Every day, she picks the same spot on the fifth floor, next to the vending machine, where she reads or does her homework. She also works as a tutor at the campus learning center, where students come in for tutoring and she ends up “busy talking.”
Her study habits are a bit unusual. When deadlines stack up, she throws away the "one thing at a time" method most people stick to. "I found myself trying to do, like, three or four things at the same time, and sometimes that insanely works," she says, also giving credit to the excitement she feels when there are last-minute challenges.
However, there’s one thing she doesn’t do regarding study habits, and that is taking notes on a laptop. She tried it during the pandemic, when everyone moved to screens, and found it didn't work for her. "If I type on a laptop, which is a lot faster than my handwriting, it doesn't go into my brain," she says. Instead, she rewrites her important notes by hand to reorganize them and also prints out her readings so she can mark and annotate them. She still keeps a thick binder with all of her class materials.
Hester also has a good reason for writing her notes by hand instead of typing them. Pam Mueller, a researcher at Princeton, found that students who write notes by hand remember more than those who type. When you write, you have to slow down, so you think about the ideas and use your own words instead of copying everything. Mueller says it is harder to get students to use pen instead of laptop. But if she’d had Hester in her class, there would have been no complaints.
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Yuma Shuto is currently pursuing an Associate of Arts at LUJ. He is a former student government council member.
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