Op-Eds do not reflect the editorial opinion of The Daily Free Press. They are solely the opinion of the author.
Max Pociask is a 2025 graduate of the Boston University College of Arts and Sciences and former opinion columnist for The Daily Free Press.
Yes, you.
You, reading this on your laptop in the middle of lecture. Shut it and run out the door.
There are hundreds of things that will bring more value. You can go to the movies, for example. Or maybe do a new drug for the first time. You have nothing to lose. If your parents front the bill or you’re on scholarship, you have no excuse.
Let’s be honest, you weren’t paying attention anyway.
In April of 2024, I skipped my economics class and drove my three most belligerent friends deep into Vermont to watch the moon cover up the sun. It was awesome. We saw a DJ while wearing tinfoil hats, drank excessively and crowd-surfed to “Short Dick Man” by Gillette.
All my cherished college memories came from outside the classroom. I crashed parties. I shot a sitcom with my best friends. I ran around campus in a giant hamster ball. And I graduated cum laude. Who cares?
Unemployment among recent male graduates ages 22 to 27 is now roughly the same, regardless of if they hold a degree or not. So if you’re racking up around $40,000 in debt — the average amount for student loans, according to the Education Data Initiative — you’d better come out of it with some stories to tell.
Or you could stay in class. You could participate, if you really cared, but you’d look like a bozo.
Nobody talks in discussion sections. They’re on their laptops, too. They should also skip class. Snap those classmates out of it. Invite them for drinks or to a show. Ask them on a date, or rally a band of vandals. None of you are learning right now — but you could be.
My smartest friends skipped class. My smartest friends work in finance. They use AI to optimize the kill chain. If your greatest piece of political resistance is your ability to sit in lecture and look at Depop, you will end up renting a shoebox apartment with your more interesting peers.
Skip class and protest. Skip class and learn how a nonprofit works. Skip class and train to carve a spoon out of a tree branch.
Show up late to the “syllabus week” because you rented a shed in a cornfield, filled it with your grandmother’s Halloween decorations and paid bands to play there on a Friday night. So now there’s 300 other kids skipping class together. And you have to clean it up and drop a bunch of cash at the ATM.
Skip class and read a textbook. It’s better than playing 2048 in class.
Skip class and join a political journal. Maybe you’ll learn something. Maybe you’ll make a friend. And when the textbook is too dense and the piece you’re writing gets stuck, go to office hours and ask for help.
The professor will say something like, “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.” They might follow it with, “Thanks for coming. Nobody else has questions at this point in the semester.”
They might be bored — like you. They might be excited to work through a problem with you. Maybe they’ll help you finish that article. Maybe they’ll tell you there’s a talented expert talking at the front of your 100-person Pinterest seminar, and she’s actually pretty cool.
So you might start showing up to class. You might greet the professor by name, answer questions and not even bring a laptop at all. Your attendance might be spotty, but you know the textbook — you’re arriving with a razor-sharp attitude.
The lecture might not make sense. You might derail the whole class. Your professor is on board, however, because they understand where you’re coming from. You both might learn something brand new — together.
But you shouldn’t do that.
You’d look like a try-hard, talking up there and disturbing the peace of your perfectly attendant classmates in the back row. So maybe stay quiet, stay disengaged.
But you’re probably better off skipping class.
