Well, that damn paper is finally done. Oh, by the way, it’s a 5-6 page assignment that I just spent 30-40 hours on. And it’s only about 4 3/4 pages long, but there is nothing else I can say. I have expanded, added quotes, done everything I can to get it to this point. I can neither think about it nor deal with it anymore.
So it’s done, as is the other paper that’s due tomorrow. Now I can relax a little, take this short (4 day trip) for part of spring break (traveling with lots of reading material, naturally) and then come back and write the next paper.
Now I’m going to see if the eye doc can see me this afternoon.
Poor Lsura! Grad school is not for the faint of heart. It was such a relief to graduate and get an 8-to-5 job. “You mean I get to go home at the end of the day? There’s no homework? No papers? No ego-mad professors? Oh frabjuous day! Calloo! Callay!”
Hang in there, babe. If you’ve made it this far without 1) a breakdown or 2) a drinking problem, you’re ahead of the game.
Remember this: starting papers early does not mean and will never mean that you will finish early. There is no finish early. Papers expand to fill the time given them: you can always revise, exapand, clarify, elaborate, etc, and and all starting a month early does is insure that the content of the paper is about 1000X better (which is not insignifigant, obviously). But don’t feel for a second that if you started early you should finish early. Never happens.
As far as lengh goes, think fixed width fonts. Like Courier. 11 point courier is a longer paper than 12 point Times New Roman. I’m pretty verbose, so my problem is usually in the other direction.
Well, since this is the pit, and I am a student, I feel that I have a real positive contribution to make here:
FUCK AP PHYSICS!!! FUCK MY FUCKING INSTRUCTOR AND THE HIGH FUCKING HORSE HE RODE IN ON! I have four other AP/post AP instructors! You are NOT special.
Every year, literally 95-97% of his class recieves five’s on the exam, and yet he still continues to assign weekly ten hour homework sets. Other students in other schools take AP Physics, and it’s nothing especially hard. But my teacher makes it that way. He literally wants us to spend an hour+ afterschool for the next three out of four schooldays to work on his precious little physics projects.
He doesn’t understand that we already have sports, work, and yes, other academic commitments already.
I so feel the grad student pain. Especially because right now I’m in the break phase of doing a take home final. You heard me a fucking final. See someone in the cognitive psych department thought it would be a good plan to have the classes change half way through the semester. So last week one class ended and another began and thus a final in the middle of the semester.
I just don’t care about visual perception and attention anymore. The fusiform gyrus can kiss my ass. I bet the bugger lights up in fMRI studies just to foster debate between scientists. I tell you our brains are against us, zombies are clearly our saviors (Groening et al 2000).
I’m sorry, but this is a particular pet peeve of mine. You don’t have to take five advanced courses! You shouldn’t be taking five advanced courses and be invovlved in other stuff! Advanced courses should be tough enough that even the very, very smart and dedicated kids can’t possibly do it all, because ottherwise, they aren’t challenging enough.
Trust me, all that work that is driving you crazy is driving him crazy as well. If he felt like he could have as many people pass while doing less, he’d do less, because every assinment you do one of, he has to grade/process 125 of.
I see kids working themselves to death all the time and blaiming the teachers. You knew at the onset what his class was like, you knew what all your other classes were like, you knew that you wanted to be involved in many things. Next time you face a situation like this, take a deep breath and say “It’s ok to not do everything all at once. Which of these things do I want the most?”
Yep, same boat. I’m on my final class before I graduate with my MA and I have a paper due next week. Luckily, it’s a lower level class I have to take to fulfill a cognate requirement, so, unlike my normal major the paper I have to write does not deal with theory, criticism or any other such hoo-hah. It has content. I’m actually looking forward to writing it. Weird.
10-12 pages on Harper and Row vs Nation Enterprises. Yay, fair use.
To the OP. What exactly is “information science” in this context? Are you in an MLS program? Or is it the more technical end of IS?
To those who say work is hell, well I agreed with that statement when my only working experience was entry level clerical stuff. God, how I remember my first full-time summer job, making ledger entries in an non-computerized office (this was back in the 1970’s). It was so bad I made sure not to look out the window, for fear that I’d register the fact that the shadows had only moved so far, meaning most of the day stretched out bleakly ahead.
But I’ve enjoyed all my professional jobs very much. Money is nice too, the lack of which is and obvious drawback of student life.
I recently got my degree after six looooong years in grad school. There were times, even as I was writing up my dissertation, that I thought it would be easier to just drop out (and drop out more than half my starting class ultimately did). The pay sucks (assuming you are paid), and living like a pauper while you watch all your age peers move forward in life is very depressing. This is at least counterbalanced with getting to spend lots of time with intelligent, engaging people that aren’t (yet) slaves to modern society and the work-buy-consume ethic imposed on us, as well as having a lot of flexibility in work schedule. I don’t know if I’d repeat the process, knowing what I know now, but I am glad now to have the degree, and figure I can at least have a semi-comfortable life.
Yeah, it’s an MLS - or more accurately at my school, an MSIS. I enjoy it, I really do. And I enjoy the class that the paper is for, I just hated the paper.
And I can’t change the font 'cause it gets turned in electronically - if it looks too big it can just be changed to something else.
I worked for more than seven years between my undergrad degree and starting this one. I know that’s hell, especially when you’re not doing what you want to be doing, but are in a field that you sort of fell into.
Next week is spring break, followed by a month with my nose to the grindstone. Then the semester will be over, and I’ll have about a month to relax before summer classes start (if I get the GA I’m interviewing for…if I don’t get it, I’ll find some sort of summer job and go that way).
Lsura, what’s your school? I got my MLS from UCLA, but I worked as an indexer for a publisher for a couple of years after that, and thenceforward moved farther and farther away from the library field. I didn’t mean for that to happen, it was just that opportunities presented themselves. I’ve been working most of my professional life as a programmer analyst.
I feel your pain. No doubt you also get the questions about what can you possibly need to study for two years in order to be a librarian. As a matter of fact we’ve talked about that in this thread.
I always used to tell them to think of it as a form of public administration.
