Post by Tobias Riss

What Stanford students really do during lectures 👀 Last quarter I was auditing a few Stanford classes. While listening to the great lecturers, something else often caught my attention. Nowadays everyone sits with their laptop in the classroom, but how do Stanford students use it to keep track of their lectures? I assumed everyone was using the latest AI tools. Voice agents transcribing lectures, notes auto-saved into Obsidian, LLMs sorting everything into clean summaries they can revise between classes. That’s at least what I thought. In reality, most of them were scrolling LinkedIn or reading articles about topics they care about.📱 This actually reflects how Stanford teaches. Lectures focus more on discussion and personal opinions than pure theory. Classes are small, people are well informed, and open discussions take up roughly half the time, creating a space that fosters creativity to develop your own ideas and connect with like-minded people.💡