Term Papers
So, in college, apparently term papers are supposed to be important, and count as a significant portion of your grade. Certainly, when a person works on these things over time, planning it, writing it, developing it, proofreading it, going back and changing certain things, etc., the best possible paper will result. That is probably the best way for a person to work up to his or her full potential.
However, as I have many distractions and things that I would rather do at school (besides working on term papers), I seem to have adopted a strategy for doing these important papers. My strategy is to not even think about them at all until the very end of the semester, and then to do it all in one night.
For example, I had a paper due in my political science class, "Islam and Politics." Our professor kept reminding us that we needed to get our topics approved by him, and that we only had a week left, etc. So, I contacted him with an idea for my topic. Unfortunately he didn't like my idea that much I don't think, and he wanted to change it a bit. So, I used this as an excuse to not think about the paper until the day before it was due.
Then on that day, I picked a topic, talked to my professor, and wrote the whole paper. It was a horribly inefficient use of time because I think the whole paper could have been done in about 6 hours (including the necessary research). However, I started it at noon and went to bed at 5AM. This was roughly 17 hours, the majority of which was spent on my paper. (Certainly I took some breaks though. . . which counted for a few hours)
All the pressure is a great motivator, and I ended up getting an "A-/A" . I was very happy with this, though I wondered why he couldn't just give me a definitive grade?!? Professors like messing with our minds I guess.
A similar technique was employed on my Ancient Philosophy final paper. . . I haven't gotten it back yet, but something tells me I didn't do quite as good a job on that one, especially because I "finished" it 6 minutes before it was due, and we had the assignment for a month.
So, this technique works sometimes, though I plan on avoiding this in the future.
--David
So, in college, apparently term papers are supposed to be important, and count as a significant portion of your grade. Certainly, when a person works on these things over time, planning it, writing it, developing it, proofreading it, going back and changing certain things, etc., the best possible paper will result. That is probably the best way for a person to work up to his or her full potential.
However, as I have many distractions and things that I would rather do at school (besides working on term papers), I seem to have adopted a strategy for doing these important papers. My strategy is to not even think about them at all until the very end of the semester, and then to do it all in one night.
For example, I had a paper due in my political science class, "Islam and Politics." Our professor kept reminding us that we needed to get our topics approved by him, and that we only had a week left, etc. So, I contacted him with an idea for my topic. Unfortunately he didn't like my idea that much I don't think, and he wanted to change it a bit. So, I used this as an excuse to not think about the paper until the day before it was due.
Then on that day, I picked a topic, talked to my professor, and wrote the whole paper. It was a horribly inefficient use of time because I think the whole paper could have been done in about 6 hours (including the necessary research). However, I started it at noon and went to bed at 5AM. This was roughly 17 hours, the majority of which was spent on my paper. (Certainly I took some breaks though. . . which counted for a few hours)
All the pressure is a great motivator, and I ended up getting an "A-/A" . I was very happy with this, though I wondered why he couldn't just give me a definitive grade?!? Professors like messing with our minds I guess.
A similar technique was employed on my Ancient Philosophy final paper. . . I haven't gotten it back yet, but something tells me I didn't do quite as good a job on that one, especially because I "finished" it 6 minutes before it was due, and we had the assignment for a month.
So, this technique works sometimes, though I plan on avoiding this in the future.
--David
posted by David Pritts at 1:08 PM
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