Rise of the Universities by Term Paper

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Many of these students will eventually graduate after they manage to get their lives together, just as most of the medieval students managed to gain certificates of learning from their professors.

While many students had trouble with motivation, many others did not. Many of today's students are highly motivated and sure of their future, and so were many medieval students. A majority of the records that exist about medieval student life are from the students themselves, in the form of poetry, manuals, and letters (Haskins 66), and many of these were the top students of their time. Often, the students requested money in their letters, with books and lodging being the main costs for many students. Many other letters indicate that just as today, many students are loath to leave the university environment, and continue in their studies, become "perpetual students." Haskins continues, "Such youths were slow to quit academic life. Again and again the ask permission to have their term of study extended" (Haskins 81). Students looked forward to their summer breaks, and many of the wealthier students traveled during their breaks, visiting some of the more famous cities in Europe.

At the modern university, it is often the brash, reckless students who gain attention, and the studious scholars often blend into the background. This was also common in medieval universities. As Haskins notes, "The good student's occupations are best reflected in the course of study, his assiduity best seen in his note-books and disputations" (Haskins 90). Another walk around the Polytechnic campus would show these students too, but they do not stand out, so they might be harder to discover. They are the ones bent over their laptops in the library, laboriously taking notes from a stack of texts, and the ones with their lights on the latest in the dormitories, studying long after the rest of their roommates have disappeared for the night or have gone to sleep.

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These are the students who hold their professors responsible for their teaching, and are intent on learning as much as they can to ensure a bright future. All of the students at Polytechnic, or any university, are not that dedicated, but many of them are, and their roots lie in the very same type of students in medieval times. As Haskin states about medieval students, "In substance, though not in form, many of them are almost as representative of modern Harvard or Yale as of mediaeval Oxford or Paris" (Haskins 92). Many modern students might expect their age-old counterparts to be quite different from the students of today, but the truth is, there are far more commonalities than differences between the modern university student and the ancient scholar.

In conclusion, there are certainly many differences between students attending universities in medieval times, and students attending universities today. However, the many similarities far outweigh the differences, and indicate that through the passage of time, students at universities are remarkably similar, no matter where they are and what they study. Medieval university students liked to party, hang out with friends, study hard when necessary, and go on to make their mark in the world, just like modern university students of today. The differences are important, but it is much more significant that students of all ages have such remarkable similarities. Each generation seems to bemoan the "ruination" of the previous generation, but studies like this book indicate that successive generations, even split by centuries, are not really that different after all, and that students have been the same for hundreds of years, and will continue to be the same for many more millennia to come......

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