STUDENT LIFE
Student Life is here for you; our most basic task is helping students
get the most out of their experiences at the university. With Student
Life you can find your own niche on campus; connect with students within
or beyond your residence hall, organization, or academic program; get
involved in student organizations, leadership opportunities, and campus
jobs and internships; and choose the housing and dining and living
options that work best for you.
What is student life like?
Being
a student is fun, but it does have its down side. For most students it
is the first time that they have left home and is therefore somewhat
disconcerting. The realization that there is now no mechanism around to
take dirty smelly clothes and magically transform them into clean ones
is a horrible one. There is also the feeling that nobody at university
particularly cares about you, or how you are doing. This is not true;
courses come complete with a whole bunch of people who are there to
provide support.
The supervisor is your academic support person. They are a useful weapon of first resort if you have problems with your course or any aspect of student life. It is important that you get on well with your supervisor, laugh at his or her jokes, pay regular visits etc; one day he or she may have to tell a sceptical staff meeting that the reason you failed your exam was that a giant magpie flew off with your revision notes.The supervisor is also the person you will want to write a glowing reference for you when you apply for jobs after graduation.
You get to meet your supervisor on the very first day of your course, and keep in touch for the rest of your stay in the university. If you have any questions about how life is lived, or university procedure, ask your supervisor first. They may not know the answer, but they will certainly know someone who might.
At Hull we also have a Student Success Adviser. Emily can give you advice on directions to travel if you are having problems. She makes call to each of our students when they join the department and can provide great advice on the best way to do well in the university.
One of the more interesting things about joining a university is that a whole new set of eyes will be seeing you at work. This means that at Hull we frequently pick up on issues such as dispraxia which might have passed unnoticed until students come to study at university. We have a Disabilities Tutor who is very experienced in spotting these issues and suggesting suitable support.
None of our support staff will actually admit to wearing vests with a big "S" on underneath their shirts, but they have been known to do some pretty superhuman things for their students.
Although you are poor, so is just about everybody else you know, and the Union Main Bar seems to do a pretty good trade most nights. All of which brings me to my favourite student joke, which appeared on a computer system in this department :
Q: What's green and takes a week to drink?
A: Your student loan cheque....
If you have money problems tell your supervisor. It is unlikely that he or she will immediately produce a wad of notes, but they do know who to put you in touch with, and anything which may have a bearing on how you perform academically is something you should tell your supervisor about.
At Hull we have "Peer Assisted Student Study" sessions which are run by third and fourth year students who are there to give you help getting through the content. They've "been there" and survived the experience. The are a great place to find out the best wasy to cope. The good news is that after a while you will find that the work will settle down (and you might even find a launderette to do you clothes - or just go home with a huge bag of washing...).
One pro tip is to check on the description for the courses that you are doing and find out just when work will be dished out and is due in. At Hull we have a timetable just for this, so students can plan their social life around your workload.
Much of the stress and strain of student life remains hidden. In reality faculty, student deans, clinicians know little about their students outside of the classroom. Students might know about their own circumstances and patterns but know little about classmates. To shine a light on student life we develop the first of a kind StudentLife smartphone app and sensing system to automatically infer human behavior. Why do some students do better than others? Under similar conditions, why do some individuals excel while others fail? Why do students burnout, drop classes, even drop out of college? What is the impact of stress, mood, workload, sociability, sleep and mental health on academic performance (i.e., GPA)? The study used an android app we developed for smartphones carried by 48 students over a 10 week term to find answers to some of these pressing questions.
We use computational methods and machine learning algorithms on the phone to assess sensor data and make higher level inferences (i.e., sleep, sociability, activity, etc.) The StudentLife app that ran on students' phones automatically measured the following human behaviors 24/7 without any user interaction:
Below you will find papers that report on some of the findings from the StudentLife dataset. Because we are interested in spurring work in mining human behavior we have released an anonymized version of the StudentLife dataset (see below).
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions relating to the project, findings or dataset.
The study captured behavioral trends across the Dartmouth term. For example, students returned from spring break feeling good about themselves, relaxed (i.e., low stress levels), sleeping well and going to the gym regularly. That all changed once the Dartmouth term picked up speed toward midterm and finals, as shown in the plot.
The timeline above shows conversation frequency and duration across the term. Students start the term by having long (possibly) social conversations. They'd just returned form spring break after all.
As midterm approaches they start having more frequent conversations but they are shorter in length. During midterm week conservation is much more businesslike in comparison to the start of term; that is, students have fewer, shorter conversations. As the term draws to an end things switch around and people have more frequent, longer conservations. Does that sound like your Dartmouth term?
The term starts with students being very active. Strangely enough they don't get much sleep during the first week of term. Why is that? Possibly partying and socializing at the start of term. Class attendance is excellent. As the term gets underway things change. Activity drops sharply to its lowest level during midterm and stays that way for the rest of the term. Sleep follows a similar pattern -- drops to a low point during midterm and then plummets at the end of term.
Interestingly enough, class attendance drops off steadily across the term to a low point where students are only attending 25% of their classes on average. Our results also indicate that there is no correlation between class attendance and grade.
The predicted GPA strongly correlates with the ground truth from students’ transcripts (r = 0.81 and p < 0.001) and predicts GPA within ±0.179 of the reported grades. Our results open the way for novel interventions to improve academic performance. [pdf]
The two plots show when students party and study. This data is automatically inferred by the students’ phones and correlates with the party and study scene at Dartmouth.
This plot shows the partying trends across the complete term. Most
partying happens at the start of term and then declines until the spring
festival week (called Green Key) then there is little in the way of
partying as students buckle down to the end of term and finals.
This is an interesting plot. Class attendance drops after the midterm
period but there is an opposite increase in studying? Students are
missing classes but studying more.
The dataset is from 48 undergrads and grad students at Dartmouth over the 10 week spring term. It includes over 53 GB of continuous data, 32,000 self-reports, and pre-post surveys; specifically it comprises:
One could imagine that an app like StudentLife could be used for real-time feedback on campus safety, students at risk; or answer questions like "how stressed is campus right now?" or instead of waiting until the end of term to assess class quality such a tool could give immediate reaction about the quality of teaching at any moment in time.
We purposely provided students with no feedback because we didn't want to use StudentLife as a behavioral change tool. We simply wanted to "record" their time on campus. Providing feedback and intervention is the next step. For example, we might inform students of risky behavior; such as, partying too much, poor levels of sleep for peak academic performance, poor eating habits, too socially isolated, not flourishing, struggling, etc.
There are many stakeholders in student life on campus (see image
above): students, faculty, student deans, docs, friends and family. All
have only partial state information. We imagine StudentLife 2.0 will
allow students to "connect" stakeholders by sharing their data. Such a
vision represents a massive privacy problem that needs to be solved.
However by connecting the stakeholders StudentLife could provide new
forms of intervention to promote healthy living and safety on campus as
well as help students modulate their behavior (e.g., could be as simple
as not pulling all-nights and getting regular sleep) to improve GPA and
life on campus.
Support
Every institution will have a support infrastructure to help you to get the best from your student life. It is important that you identify these folks. They might be called tutors or supervisors. At Hull we have supervisors backed up by a Student Success Adviser and a Disabilities Tutor.The supervisor is your academic support person. They are a useful weapon of first resort if you have problems with your course or any aspect of student life. It is important that you get on well with your supervisor, laugh at his or her jokes, pay regular visits etc; one day he or she may have to tell a sceptical staff meeting that the reason you failed your exam was that a giant magpie flew off with your revision notes.The supervisor is also the person you will want to write a glowing reference for you when you apply for jobs after graduation.
You get to meet your supervisor on the very first day of your course, and keep in touch for the rest of your stay in the university. If you have any questions about how life is lived, or university procedure, ask your supervisor first. They may not know the answer, but they will certainly know someone who might.
At Hull we also have a Student Success Adviser. Emily can give you advice on directions to travel if you are having problems. She makes call to each of our students when they join the department and can provide great advice on the best way to do well in the university.
One of the more interesting things about joining a university is that a whole new set of eyes will be seeing you at work. This means that at Hull we frequently pick up on issues such as dispraxia which might have passed unnoticed until students come to study at university. We have a Disabilities Tutor who is very experienced in spotting these issues and suggesting suitable support.
None of our support staff will actually admit to wearing vests with a big "S" on underneath their shirts, but they have been known to do some pretty superhuman things for their students.
Money
One of the big problems with being a student is that you have almost no money. Financially, the student's lot has got much harder over the years. However, living at university does not have to be expensive; the on-site catering does good food at reasonable prices, and university accommodation represents pretty good value.Although you are poor, so is just about everybody else you know, and the Union Main Bar seems to do a pretty good trade most nights. All of which brings me to my favourite student joke, which appeared on a computer system in this department :
Q: What's green and takes a week to drink?
A: Your student loan cheque....
If you have money problems tell your supervisor. It is unlikely that he or she will immediately produce a wad of notes, but they do know who to put you in touch with, and anything which may have a bearing on how you perform academically is something you should tell your supervisor about.
Workload
The workload can be pretty daunting at first, until you find a rhythm. There's a kind of "calm before the storm" when you arrive, as for the first few weeks you won't have much work assigned to you. However, on most courses that changes pretty quickly a few weeks in when the first courseworks land (usually around the time that you run out of clean underwear....). Be prepared for this, and make sure that you take advice as soon as you feel that you might be losing touch with the pace.At Hull we have "Peer Assisted Student Study" sessions which are run by third and fourth year students who are there to give you help getting through the content. They've "been there" and survived the experience. The are a great place to find out the best wasy to cope. The good news is that after a while you will find that the work will settle down (and you might even find a launderette to do you clothes - or just go home with a huge bag of washing...).
One pro tip is to check on the description for the courses that you are doing and find out just when work will be dished out and is due in. At Hull we have a timetable just for this, so students can plan their social life around your workload.
The Social Whirl
Everyone should have a social life. Even Computer Scientists. At the start of your university life you will get to go to some kind of "Fresher's Fair" where all the various student societies tell you what they get up to and encourage you to join in. It might be best not to sign up for everything, but it might be fun to have a go at something you have never done before. Particularly if it takes you right out of your comfort zone. Things involving public speaking, such as debating, are a great way to brush up your presentation skills and make friends with people on courses completely different from yours.The Student Life
Perhaps the most important thing about being a student is that it is a time of your life when you can devote yourself pretty much entirely to something that really interests you. If you enjoy writing sonnets, an english course is a great place to be. And if you enjoy making computers do things, and finding out just what they can do, then a Computer Science degree makes a great deal of sense.StudentLife Study
StudentLife is the first study that uses passive and automatic sensing data from the phones of a class of 48 Dartmouth students over a 10 week term to assess their mental health (e.g., depression, loneliness, stress), academic performance (grades across all their classes, term GPA and cumulative GPA) and behavioral trends (e.g., how stress, sleep, visits to the gym, etc. change in response to college workload -- i.e., assignments, midterms, finals -- as the term progresses).
Much of the stress and strain of student life remains hidden. In reality faculty, student deans, clinicians know little about their students outside of the classroom. Students might know about their own circumstances and patterns but know little about classmates. To shine a light on student life we develop the first of a kind StudentLife smartphone app and sensing system to automatically infer human behavior. Why do some students do better than others? Under similar conditions, why do some individuals excel while others fail? Why do students burnout, drop classes, even drop out of college? What is the impact of stress, mood, workload, sociability, sleep and mental health on academic performance (i.e., GPA)? The study used an android app we developed for smartphones carried by 48 students over a 10 week term to find answers to some of these pressing questions.
We use computational methods and machine learning algorithms on the phone to assess sensor data and make higher level inferences (i.e., sleep, sociability, activity, etc.) The StudentLife app that ran on students' phones automatically measured the following human behaviors 24/7 without any user interaction:
- bed time, wake up time and sleep duration
- the number of conversations and duration of each conversation per day
- physical activity (walking, sitting, running, standing)
- where they were located and who long they stayed there (i.e., dorm, class, party, gym)
- the number of people around a student through the day
- outdoor and indoor (in campus buildings) mobility
- stress level through the day, across the week and term
- positive affect (how good they felt about themselves)
- eating habits (where and when they ate)
- app usage
- in-situ comments on campus and national events: dimension protest, cancelled classes; Boston bombing.
Below you will find papers that report on some of the findings from the StudentLife dataset. Because we are interested in spurring work in mining human behavior we have released an anonymized version of the StudentLife dataset (see below).
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions relating to the project, findings or dataset.
Is there a rhythm to the Dartmouth term?
We have a hypothesis that there is a signature to the Dartmouth term. That is, if we gave StudentLife to all students at Dartmouth we'd find a common rhythm to the intense Dartmouth term. You'll see some examples of the "dart-rhythm" below. Take a look at the paper for more detailed results.The study captured behavioral trends across the Dartmouth term. For example, students returned from spring break feeling good about themselves, relaxed (i.e., low stress levels), sleeping well and going to the gym regularly. That all changed once the Dartmouth term picked up speed toward midterm and finals, as shown in the plot.
The timeline above shows conversation frequency and duration across the term. Students start the term by having long (possibly) social conversations. They'd just returned form spring break after all.
As midterm approaches they start having more frequent conversations but they are shorter in length. During midterm week conservation is much more businesslike in comparison to the start of term; that is, students have fewer, shorter conversations. As the term draws to an end things switch around and people have more frequent, longer conservations. Does that sound like your Dartmouth term?
The term starts with students being very active. Strangely enough they don't get much sleep during the first week of term. Why is that? Possibly partying and socializing at the start of term. Class attendance is excellent. As the term gets underway things change. Activity drops sharply to its lowest level during midterm and stays that way for the rest of the term. Sleep follows a similar pattern -- drops to a low point during midterm and then plummets at the end of term.
Interestingly enough, class attendance drops off steadily across the term to a low point where students are only attending 25% of their classes on average. Our results also indicate that there is no correlation between class attendance and grade.
Predicting GPA from Phones
Many cognitive, behavioral, and environmental factors impact student learning during college. The SmartGPA study uses passive sensing data and self-reports from students’ smartphones to understand individual behavioral differences between high and low performers during a single 10-week term. We propose new methods for better understanding study (e.g., study duration) and social (e.g., partying) behavior of a group of undergraduates. We show that there are a number of important behavioral factors automatically inferred from smartphones that significantly correlate with term and cumulative GPA, including time series analysis of activity, conversational interaction, mobility, class attendance, studying, and partying. We propose a simple model based on linear regression with lasso regularization that can accurately predict cumulative GPA.The predicted GPA strongly correlates with the ground truth from students’ transcripts (r = 0.81 and p < 0.001) and predicts GPA within ±0.179 of the reported grades. Our results open the way for novel interventions to improve academic performance. [pdf]
The two plots show when students party and study. This data is automatically inferred by the students’ phones and correlates with the party and study scene at Dartmouth.
StudentLife Dataset
The StudentLife dataset is a large, longitudinal dataset that is rich in formation and deep. Importantly, the dataset is anonymized protecting the privacy of the participants in the study.The dataset is from 48 undergrads and grad students at Dartmouth over the 10 week spring term. It includes over 53 GB of continuous data, 32,000 self-reports, and pre-post surveys; specifically it comprises:
- objective sensing data: sleep (bedtime, duration, wake up); conservation duration, conversation frequency; physical activity (stationary, walk, run);
- location-based data: location, co-location, indoor and outdoor mobility;
- other phone data: light, Bluetooth, audio, Wi-Fi, screen lock/unlock, phone charge, app usage.
- self-reports: affect (PAM), stress, behavior, Boston bombing reaction, cancelled classes, class opinion, comment, Dartmouth now, Dimension incident, Dimension protest, dining halls, events, exercise, Green Key, lab, mood, loneliness, social and study spaces.
- pre-post surveys: PHQ9 depression scale, UCLA loneliness scale, positive and negative affect schedule (PANAS), perceived stress scale (PSS), big five personality, flourishing scale, Pittsburgh sleep quality index, veterans RAND 12 item health (VR12)
- academic performance data: class information, deadlines, grades (grades, term GPA, cumulative GPA), piazza data
- dinning data: meals data, location and time
- seating data: seating position of students in Android programming
- entry and exit surveys: to be added once anonymized
- Facebook data: not sure we can release this until we are convinced it is fully anonymized
Dataset detailed description here
Download the StudentLife dataset here
StudentLife 2.0
What's next for StudentLife? In a word we want to add intervention to the app. In the future, we hope StudentLife will help students boost their academic performance while living a balanced life on campus.One could imagine that an app like StudentLife could be used for real-time feedback on campus safety, students at risk; or answer questions like "how stressed is campus right now?" or instead of waiting until the end of term to assess class quality such a tool could give immediate reaction about the quality of teaching at any moment in time.
We purposely provided students with no feedback because we didn't want to use StudentLife as a behavioral change tool. We simply wanted to "record" their time on campus. Providing feedback and intervention is the next step. For example, we might inform students of risky behavior; such as, partying too much, poor levels of sleep for peak academic performance, poor eating habits, too socially isolated, not flourishing, struggling, etc.
