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During their teen years, two students at Harvard Universitybecame study buddies. Whether this was by accident or design, I have no idea. This experience may very well have contributed to the pair becoming filthy rich in later years but that is not to say that the goal of having a study buddy is eventually to become wealthy. One of the pair was known to his friends as B.G. The other you should be able to suss out with a little research.

You may very well ask what purpose a study buddy serves. The answer is simple. However, before I answer the question, I wish to inform you that identical twins would not make a productive study buddy pair. Why? You need someone with different genes.

The purpose of having a study buddy is to work with someone whose academic skill set differs at least slightly from yours. This means that quite often your study buddy will be from time to time at a different point on the learning curve.

Until I was about to take on a 400 level history course, I must admit that I had never cottoned on to the advantages to be gained by working with a partner. It was only through serendipity that I came to team up with a study buddy.

Quite by coincidence, on the impending initial day of British History: 1925 – 1975, I happened to meet Jessica. We ended up at the same table in the cafeteria, which was somewhat over crowded. Over coffee, we couldn’t help discovering that we were enrolled in the same course. We were both lugging an identical 800 page text. Jessica expounded upon her analytical skills. We spent the hour before class going through the first chapter of our text. By the time that we arrived at our classroom, Jessica had laid down some of her study buddy ground rules.

The first rule was to remain focused on British History. The second rule was that both of us would make up quizzes every single day. The third rule was that we would not waste a single minute for the next six weeks.

As this was a summer school course, the time parameter was severely constricted. We had a ninety-minute lecture from Professor Higgins, which was followed by a twenty-minute break and then we were subjected to a second lecture. At the end of each week we had been subjected to 15 hours of class instruction. This suggests that we would be listening to a total of ninety hours of lectures over the course of the summer.

How does one stay awake for ninety hours? It is not impossible to create a system that will keep one alert. After the first two lectures on the first Monday, we examined the text and soon realized our professor had stuck quite closely to the substance of the text and had re-interpreted parts of it.

During the break almost all of the other students had headed off to the cafeteria. Jessica and I analyzed as much as we could about what the professor had said in his first kick at the can. This took us about ten minutes and we then spent the remaining time projecting what we were likely to hear in the second scenario.

That afternoon we soon learned that our professor had assigned us three novels, the most interesting of which was Singapore Grip, a lively bleak story about Singapore in the grips of the Great Depression.

One thing that Jessica and I had agreed upon was that neither of us were great note takers. We made meager notes from the text before hand and then made mental appraisals as we listened to further comments. I could not help but notice the voluminous pages that were being scrawled to oblivion. I did get a few quizzical looks as if I couldn’t keep up with the class.

At the end of the second lecture, Jessica and I had taken down a grand total of about twenty words between the two of us. Our content was primarily composed of keywords. By day two we had refined the sequence that we had used in day one.

On day three there was a slight change to which no one seemed to notice except for the two of us. At the end of the day’s lectures, our professor stated that our essay assignments were pinned up on his office door.

“First come first serve,” he said.

As soon as class had ended, Jessica and I made a beeline for the assignments as we wished to get our names on the ones that we favored. Jessica signed up for her first choice and I did likewise. Much to our disappointment, we found very little useful reference material in the library. We scooted back up to the assignment door and crossed off our first choices. We then signed out two new assignments and returned to the library. This time we managed to find something that suited each of us.

In future sessions we quizzed each other using the text. We also explained our analysis of particular points of view and our renditions were critiqued in turn. We soon got into the habit of second-guessing the professor’s impending lecture.

I made audio tapes for both of us that were taken from the most select parts of the text. In the meantime, Jessica had been making quizzes.

Here is the kicker. We had envisioned that if we spent too much time on the text, we would become bored with it. To the contrary, we soon realized that we were in a unique position when it came to the lectures. We knew the text fairly well by this time from answering quiz questions as well as from making audio tapes and listening to them.

The key lay in the ability that we had to process significant parts of the professor’s lecture with mental comments and concerns that sounded something like I agree with that. At other times, I was slightly bewildered but soon recovered when the lecturer brought his ideas back onto firm ground.

The six weeks flew by. All that Jessica and I had to look forward to was the final exam. For the first time in my academic life I had been anticipating a remarkably do able final exam.

I had the tables turned slightly on me. The exam was quite decently within my capacity. Jessica edged me out with an A+ and I had to make do with an A.

Invariably, when professors hand me back my essay, they might not have noticed me in class but they almost always commented favorably on my essay. In this particular case, I had chosen to write about Fiji, which was in the process of becoming independent after ninety-six years of British colonial rule. At the time of Independence, I happened to be living in Fiji.

When I received my essay back, the professor could not fail to remember what I had done. It annoyed him a little bit, I think.

His comments were: I should have known better than to allow you to write about something that you knew too much about.

My sin was stating the words that Prince Charles had used in his very short thank you speech to the people of Fiji during the Independence Ceremony. I had quoted Prince Charles word for word and given the translation for the Fijian parts of the speech.

I took the professor’s critique with a grain of salt. After all was said and done, I still got an A.

As for Jessica, she was soon accepted at Stanford Universtiy.