Done With Us

There is one student in our lab who is graduating this June with his Master's, and then is taking a job in the financial market. I'll call him HotShot - you can just see him being a typical high-powered Wall Street exec. Golfing, playing it up with the ladies. He really only did the engineering as a way to make money, and now he's off to the world of business where he can make even more money with even less effort.

In short, he is done with us.

This is senior-itis with a vengeance. He was in one of my classes and part of my group for the final project, and he LITERALLY did nothing. We had to tell him the title of our paper because he didn't know what we were working on. He had a second class where he was also part of a group, and I know for a fact he did nothing there either. He skipped many of his classes for the last few weeks (month?), although he did occasionally show up for his 8am class with me, which I thought was remarkable.

But when he did show up for the 8am class, he would then skip his next class and take a nap on the office couch until lunch. In fact, he took this nap so regularly that the water cooler talk in the office has started calling it "pulling a HotShot."

While I can understand the lack of motivation (shoot, I remember senior year in undergrad struggling to make myself do homework), I am a little taken aback by the total lack of any effort here. I can understand dropping a few plates, but this is not even bothering to start them spinning.

At this point, it truly doesn't matter if HotShot doesn't do anything. He'll graduate and start his new job irregardless. But if I was in the same position, I don't think I could ever check out this completely. Is this just my overachiever gene that won't let me ever take a break? Or as I heard someone say, the "rampant type A++ personalities around this place"? Or is it common practice to coast to the end?