Re-Freshman Year: If We Went Back to School Now, We Would Do This

In this article, we discuss how we would approach academia years if we went back to school knowing what we know now. We support our notion with research and a personal experience. And yes, there is indeed a stick in the coffee, which we will address shortly. And in the meantime...

The beginning of a new academic year brings the same ritual it always has: new notebooks, new timetables, a new cohort of young people walking into lecture halls for the first time. What has changed is the world around that ritual. A student in 2026 carries more retrievable information in one pocket than any library in history held a generation ago. The instinct, understandably, has been to treat this as a substitute for learning. We think that is the wrong lesson to take from it.

We are not arguing for a return to rote memorisation for its own sake. The old model, where a well-stocked memory was the primary marker of an educated person, does not fit a world where any fact is a search away. But we are equally unconvinced by the opposite drift, the assumption that familiarity with a subject is close enough to understanding it, because the details can always be looked up later. Both extremes miss the actual opportunity in front of a student today: the chance to decide, deliberately, which knowledge is worth carrying inside your own mind, and which can safely live in a device. If we were starting university again in 2026, this is how we would think about it.

Knowing something, versus knowing about something

Reread your notes twice and something predictable happens: the material feels familiar, the sentences make sense as you scan them, and it is easy to conclude you have learned it. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, psychologists at UCLA, have spent decades studying why this feeling is unreliable. Their research on what they call desirable difficulties shows that the conditions which make learning feel easy in the moment, such as rereading or highlighting, are often the same conditions that produce weak long-term retention. The effort that feels unpleasant while studying, testing yourself without your notes, spacing sessions apart, retrieving an answer instead of recognising it, tends to be exactly what makes the knowledge stick.

Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger tested this directly in a 2008 study published in the journal Science. Students who repeated retrieval practice, quizzing themselves on material they had just studied, recalled far more of it a week later than students who simply reread the same material multiple times. The rereading group felt more confident going in. They were also the ones who had forgotten the most by the time it mattered.

This is worth sitting with, because it explains a familiar disappointment: the student who does well on a test at the start of term and can barely reconstruct the material a few weeks later. Passing an exam and having learned something are not the same event, and the gap between the two is precisely the gap between fluency and understanding.

There is a second test worth applying here, one older than any of this research: try explaining the idea to someone else. Preferably someone without your background, who will ask the obvious question you have not yet had to answer for yourself. Teaching a concept in plain language forces you to take it apart and put it back together in a form that holds up outside your own head. If you can only repeat what you read, you have fluency. If you can rebuild it for someone else and have it make sense to them, you have something closer to knowledge. The practical implication is a kind of triage: some material in a term is worth this level of attention, and the rest can reasonably be left to a search bar when the moment calls for it. Knowing which is which is, in itself, a skill worth developing early. Speaking of which...

The skill that does not go out of date

If information is abundant and instantly retrievable, the scarce resource shifts. It is no longer access to knowledge, but the judgement to know what matters, the discipline to sit with a problem long enough to understand it, and the ability to communicate that understanding clearly to someone else. These are not new virtues, but they carry more weight now than they used to, precisely because the alternative, being merely familiar with a great many things, is easier than ever to fake.

A widely discussed study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, published as Academically Adrift in 2011, followed thousands of American college students and found that measurable gains in critical thinking over four years of study were smaller than most people would expect. One of their more useful findings was less about ability and more about behaviour: persistence, time management, and the willingness to keep showing up to a difficult task allowed students of moderate cognitive ability to outperform more naturally gifted peers who invested less effort. Talent mattered less than the habit of doing the work. The same research also found something worth taking seriously on its own: many students and graduates struggled to say clearly whether or how they had developed critical thinking skills at all, which made it harder for them to recognise their own capabilities, let alone describe them to an employer.

Read together, these findings suggest that critical thinking is not a subject you take, and it is not a credential you graduate with automatically. It is something built through effort applied consistently over time, and it needs to be named and understood by the person developing it, or it risks going unrecognised, even by them. University and school are, in this sense, less about the transcript and more the years in which a young person gets to practise operating in a complicated world with real stakes but manageable consequences. That practice, done deliberately, is what makes someone difficult to replace later.

The years for trying things

There is a temptation, watching a demanding world from a distance, to want young people to arrive already finished: composed, focused, certain of their direction. We think this gets the sequence backwards. School and university are the appropriate place for exploration precisely because the cost of testing an idea, changing a major, or being wrong about something is lower now than it will ever be again. Ask the question that seems obvious. Test the hypothesis that probably will not hold up. Follow the interest that has no clear application yet. The people who spend these years exploring, rather than performing a finished version of themselves, tend to arrive at the experience everyone else claims to wish they had gathered earlier.

Sometimes you do have to sleep on it

There is a reason the advice to get a good night's sleep before an exam persists, even though almost nobody follows it under pressure. Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, in their synaptic homeostasis hypothesis, describe sleep as the period in which the brain scales back the connections it built up over the day, clearing out the weaker ones to preserve the signal in the ones that matter. It is not unlike what happens when you brush your teeth: the point is not to add anything new; it is to clear away what has accumulated so the essential structure underneath can do its job properly. Sleep researchers at Harvard, including Matthew Walker and Robert Stickgold, have shown that this process is central to how facts and concepts move from a fragile, recent memory into something more durable. Skip the sleep, and the studying that came before it does not get the chance to consolidate properly.

This leads to a small, practical piece of advice that is easy to state and hard to follow: if a topic genuinely needs a final pass before an exam, it is better to wake early and do it than to stay up late the night before. We hope none of our readers ever find themselves needing this piece of advice at the last possible moment. But it is worth keeping in reserve, because at some point, it usually happens anyway.

The case for writing it down

Sorry to disappoint you... It would be reasonable to expect a luxury pen brand to use this section to make its case. That is not quite the intention here. Feel free to use a pencil, a brush, a stick dipped in coffee if that is what is available (yes, that stick we mentioned earlier). It is not the instrument that matters here. 

Writing something down by hand engages the brain differently than typing it. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, in a widely cited 2014 study published in the journal Psychological Science, found that students who took longhand notes performed better on conceptual questions afterwards than students who typed, even though the typists had captured more of the lecture, word for word. The reason appears to be exactly the inefficiency of handwriting. Because you cannot write as fast as someone speaks, you are forced to summarise, rephrase, and select as you go, which is a form of thinking, not just recording. That process, done at the moment of learning, is part of what decides later whether a subject is one you understand or merely one you recognise.

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A new timetable is the least of what a new academic year brings. For the students walking into it, there is genuine discovery ahead, real frustration, and the particular satisfaction of an idea finally landing after resisting understanding for weeks. None of it can be lived through twice, which is part of what makes it worth taking seriously the first time.

We hope this year's new arrivals find the parts of it worth holding onto, and that whichever pen happens to be nearby when they do is the pen they love. And we hope that the pen they'll love will be a Scriveiner one.