MU Student News surveyed 214 students across all years about their study habits — where they work, when, for how long, and what gets in the way. The survey ran for two weeks through the portal and posters; responses were anonymous. Here is what came back.
Where
| Location | First choice | Self-rated focus (1–5) |
|---|---|---|
| Library | 34% | 4.1 |
| Home | 29% | 3.2 |
| Common rooms | 22% | 2.9 |
| Cafeteria | 9% | 2.4 |
| Elsewhere | 6% | 3.0 |
The library is both the most popular first choice and the highest rated for focus — but respondents’ comments suggest the common rooms win on a different metric entirely: people actually go. “The library is where I plan to study. The common room is where studying happens,” wrote one junior.
When and how long
The most common session length was 30 to 60 minutes (44 percent), and the most common time was directly after last period. A stubborn 12 percent report studying mainly after 10 p.m., a group that overlaps heavily with the petitioners for the library’s new midnight hours.
The distraction column
Asked to name their single biggest obstacle, 61 percent of respondents wrote some variant of “my phone.” The most-cited remedy was also the simplest: putting it in a bag, in another room, or — one senior’s method — “in the mailbox downstairs, which I cannot open without shoes.”
Full anonymised results are available from the newsroom on request. The survey is not scientific — respondents self-selected — but at 214 responses it is the largest study-habits sample this publication has gathered.
What we’ll do with this
Two findings are already travelling. The advising office asked for the session-length data for its workload workshop, noting that the popular 30-to-60-minute block matches what it recommends — “students have converged on the right answer by trial and error,” Lindqvist observed. And the quiet-space numbers — the library’s 4.1 focus rating against everywhere else’s — have been cited in the ongoing campaign for designated silent study rooms, including in a column in our Opinion section. We will re-run the survey in spring with the same questions, so the results can be compared.
The survey’s free-text field produced its own small anthology of method, from the practical (“I start every session by writing tomorrow’s first task on a sticky note”) to the confessional (“my best studying happens in the 20 minutes before I said I’d stop”). A selection, anonymised, will run alongside the spring re-run.
