I just got back from a 200-mile round trip drive to deliver the last of this semester’s papers, thus ending my final semester of scheduled classes for graduate school. In six weeks I start on my Master’s thesis. Until then, I have a stack of reading to do. For now, the chest pains are gone. (No, that that kind of chest pains, although it took a quick trip to the ER last week to figure out what it was – anxiety + indigestion = symptoms similar to you-know-what.)
I never thought I’d actually be writing this stuff. Titles of this semester’s papers:
Challenging the Doxa: Rhetorical Persuasion by Gorgias, Fell and Weaver
Thinning the Herd: A Naturalist Explanation of Lily Bart’s Death
Failure to Elide: Alexandra’s improbable success in O Pioneers!
Anybody else done with finals? Share – what was the best, what was the worst?
congrats! I haven’t done finals in awhile, but I remember the feeling of turning in my Bachelor’s thesis (titled “Opinions of the Emperor in post-World War II Japan”) and how it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I was free like a bird, which basically lasted until I realized that I needed to find a job…
From the other side of the desk - I’m on my last class’ worth of final papers, and submit final grades tomorrow. I plan to sleep for 20 hours straight.
God bless you! Believe it or not, a year from now I want to be you. Or someone very much like you. I’m a little worried, though. Cutbacks mean fewer opportunities in academia, too.
Well, the worst for me is that I only have two papers and they are a week from each other, and at the end of term closing, I have two weeks to the first paper.
Sounds like a good deal, right?
It was hard to concentrate. Somehow the long slack period between the papers make it even more difficult to study.
I have decided to go for the full revision approach - go through each lecture thoroughly on the video, then do a mind-map off the notes and review the tutorials. It was agonizing. My brain feels bloated.
And I don’t know if it is a good thing if I can’t even remember any of the questions which I have answered. I can’t even remember a single question asked by the papers today and sometimes I have a panic attack when I try to remember if I even ever did the paper at all
:smack:
ETA: It didn’t help that I dreamed about failing my papers last night.
Yea, good luck with that. I worked for six years as a “road scholar,” our collective term for adjunct faculty. Taught at three different community colleges, taught as many as 10 classes a semester, drove 300 miles a week…It was tough. But the payoff of the full-time offer was sweet sweet reward.
I worked for six years as a “road scholar,” our collective term for adjunct faculty. Taught at three different community colleges, taught as many as 10 classes a semester, drove 300 miles a week…It was tough. But the payoff of the full-time offer was sweet sweet reward.