All the different types of note-makers you’ll find in your lectures

Sometimes you find your lecturers voice trail away and you'll spend the rest of your lecture looking around the room waiting for it to be over.

If you're a people-watcher like me, whilst you watch the clock you'll come to notice the many different ways your course-mates will try to make notes.

The handwriter

This is the technophobe who refuses to type because "writing down the words helps it go in better", even though most of the time they're handwriting is so illegible they won't be able to read it.

This results in them sitting in coffee shops, trying to read and re-write their own notes. This person also hates George Square Lecture Theatre because there is no room to lay out their Paperchase notebook and pastel Stabilo highlighters because of the serious lack of desk-room.

The Handwriter's bedroom consists of stray, unfinished pieces of paper

The iPad user

There's always one that uses an iPad, that they'll have prompted it up with their fancy Cath Kidston stand. The iPad user doesn't need the satisfaction of pressing actual keys and can apparently make a full set of notes on effectively a phone. Some people even use iPad pens to make their notes – technology gone mad!

The online shopper

This is the person who makes the effort to actually go to lectures to learn, but ends up opening five new tabs, gaining eight more Tinder matches and buying a new dress from Asos because they've left school and discovered that university doesn't have many website blockers.

They take full advantage of that fact, resulting in them uttering "what was the last bit" to their friend throughout every lecture.

A quick look at facebook never hurt anyone

The bullet pointer

This person never really got the knack of making notes, but feels socially obliged to try anyway. After 50 minutes on a lecture on Henry VIII's six wives, the bullet pointer will have come out with a piece of paper with only the date, title and just "Katherine x3, Anne x2 and Jane" written with little more else.

The frantic typer

Have you ever wondered how the sound of typing never stops, not even for a moment? That's because there's always one that will do their best to copy not just every single word on the slide, but every single word the lecturer says, terrified that missing one line will cost them their degree.

Must. Get. Everything. Down.

The voice note recorder

This is the person of urban myth – you've always heard of these people who take sound recorders in, but didn't actually believe it until one day you spotted it on the sly. This person doesn't trust the lecturers ability to record the lecture, and to be honest, I wouldn't blame them.

The person who doesn't make notes

The unsung hero of your lectures, this person made notes for the first two or three lectures and realised that these lectures are recorded, the important information is on the slides and everyone revises from just the textbooks anyway, so took the plunge and decided enough was enough, they'd make notes no more.

Instead they treat lectures like a cinema experience and, like they do whenever they want to remember things in day to day life, just listen. This person is the first to slip out because they don't have to put their notebook away, everyone else is so busy with their notemaking that they've probably never even noticed.

Just sit back and take it in