Medical students face enough pressures—the “academic weapon” trend doesn’t help

The celebration of extreme study habits encourages an unhealthy attitude to learning and success, writes Diana Dovgy The term “academic weapon” went viral around two years ago, when a video on TikTok showed a university student sitting in the front row of a 700 person lecture.1 He shared that the key to acing the semester was to become an “absolute academic weapon,” which in his eyes meant approaching university with an extremely self-assured attitude and dominating the front row in lectures. Many viewers found the student’s attitude and advice humorous, which led to other users sampling the audio to create their own study hacks—both helpful and unserious. The term academic weapon originally emerged in the 2010s2 to mean a student who acquires traits seen by many as scholarly.3 Some students use TikTok to cast an ironic lens on this idea, but other “academic weapons” have garnered attention for their extreme depictions of scholarly dedication. …