No Attendance Required: I consider myself a nontraditional learner. I have difficulties paying attention in lectures, so I tend to not attend them if there is no attendance required. As a result, I get most of my learning from reading the book or watching videos about the subject online. I find it a lot easier to pay attention when I am able to rewind parts of a video or increase the playback speed. I don't think that this is a rare thing for college students nowadays either. Most of my friends in Computer Science and ECE have professors that upload lectures to youtube so they can watch at their convenience. I know some in math classes that completely disregard the lecturer they have and watch some of the MIT open lectures or others on youtube. I do not think this is a bad thing. If these students are able to get a better understanding of the material than if they had attended lectures this is positive for education as a whole. A big exception to this rule of learning by oneself
At my software development internship last Summer that I have written on a few times I participated in a Triangular Principal-Agent relationship. I had a manager, who was the manager of the overall software team, as well as a mentor who was a normal member of the team that was tasked with being in charge of me. I did most of my work with the mentor, and I received tasks from both the mentor and the manager. Most of the time these tasks lined up roughly, in a way that I could complete everything for both of them in the given time. There were a few weeks, though, in which the tasks did not line up well and I did not have enough time to finish them. I think hypothetically it would have made more sense to complete the tasks given by the manager rather than the mentor, as he was the one with the overall vision of where the project was going. In reality, though, I found myself completing the mentor tasks first. I felt like he was more in tune with my exact role in the project and what I