By RICARDO GILB

Why study off campus, you ask? Why not go to the CoHo, to the LaIR, to Meyer, to Green, to all of the hallowed spots where such scholars as Tiger Woods must have studied? Why go out into the treacherous environment of Palo Alto only to be lost in anonymity? For starters, there’s my usual reason — that you don’t want anyone to know exactly what it is you’re studying. They would find out that the reason you are full of brilliant comments during dinner is that you spend your days reading books called “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to American Literature” and “Classical Music for Dummies.” (I don’t even want to imagine the shame, the terrible shame, of exposure! Thank God no one reads this newspaper.)

Oh, but maybe you don’t read such smut. Maybe you read only fine works of literature. Well, it’s time you faced the truth: reading those wonderful IHUM books at Stanford marks you immediately as a freshman, but off-campus, reading those same books makes you ... an intellectual! So find a friend with a car, or find a friend who happens to drive the Marguerite, or find a friend who has a helicopter and who knows how to park it in the middle of Palo Alto. Well ... I guess you could just hop on your bike if faced with no alternatives. And point your wheels (whichever kind they may be) towards the following places:

Happy Donuts. 3916 El Camino Real. (650) 843-0658

It’s not a coffee shop, but a donut shop, with donuts the way they ought to be — weighing about a pound each, unlike those puffed fluff balls that Krispy Kreme spits out. It isn’t pretty, but it’s open 24 hours and serves plenty of coffee, meaning that this isn’t so much the place to relax on a Saturday as a place to desperately attempt to keep yourself awake with chocolate eclairs and caffeine at 5 a.m. when your paper is due at 10 (that’s a.m.), and since it has free wireless access, you can finish at 9:59 and still e-mail it in by the deadline.

Printer’s Inc. Cafe, 320 California Ave., across from Antonio’s Nuthouse. (650) 323-3347

California Avenue is the center of Palo Alto’s middle-aged art scene. The Cafe itself has a gallery of art produced by locals, and across from it is a great store for photographers. Down the block, there are a few printing presses. Since this is Palo Alto and not Greenwich Village, the artistic area is also full of California spirituality — including a center for meditation and the Creative Awareness Project, a non-profit committed to researching the nature of consciousness. Even if you find it all a little silly, the local crowd does make for a peaceful neighborhood, and there’s plenty of patio space. There’s no rule that you can’t work on your tan while you work on your problem sets.

The Prolific Oven. 550 Waverly St., just off of University Drive. (650) 326-8485

You can’t count on studying to cheer you up, so sometimes you need a delicious piece of cake to do the trick. That’s where the Prolific Oven comes in, serving a variety of wonderful desserts that have made it a local favorite for many years. It doesn’t have a whole lot of personality — the decoration is sparse and the music isn’t that great, but it’s usually quiet and easy to get a big table for several people. There’s really no other place to get a piece of Chocolate Orange Almond Cake. And, as the name of the place suggests ... no, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what it means.

Coupa Cafe. 538 Ramona St. (650) 322-6872

The pun in the title is even cleverer than you might think, since it actually comes from the name of the owner, Jean Paul Coupal. Where so many coffeehouses have used a Latin American theme to suggest some kind of Bohemian sympathy with the poor, Coupal, a native of Venezuela, has used knowledge of his own country to create a wonderfully elegant hangout. Serving the finest of Venezuelan chocolates and coffees is only a bonus. There are plenty of outlets lining the walls and free wireless access, so that you can still check your e-mail between paragraphs of reading. There is even a Stanford logo in the fireplace’s tiles, just in case you were missing the feel of campus.