When I was in grad school, I had classmates who acted like this. They did things like attend those boring "town hall" meetings to weigh in on mundane decisions, and take detailed notes. I couldn't even be arsed to show up to class half the time.<p>One positive thing that I noticed about the grad student crowd is that they put an unreasonably large amount of effort into their roles as TAs. It was sort of inspiring to see, as I tended to do the bare minimum. For example, I used to tell the students "My pay does not depend on the number of people who show up, so feel free to skip class" while the other TAs would take attendance in a spreadsheet (even though they didn't use that data for anything.)