Well, I just turned in my first final seminar paper. Ahhh.... (The happy tea dance is nothing to the happy-I-just-turned-in-a-final-paper dance!)

It is due at noon, to be turned in electronically. This is the first paper that I've turned in in this manner, and I think I prefer it. It avoids any printer, ink cartridge, paper, or transportation problems, although I think perhaps the sense of accomplishment is somewhat diminished by the fact that I don't have a tangible copy of my hard work. Hmm.... Nah.

Actually, although I expected this paper to end up being *ahem* crap, I actually feel quite good about it. Once I actually started writing the darn thing, I began to understand what the heck I was writing about, which made things a lot easier, as you can imagine. Remember that quote from the wretched theory book I was reading (let's see, that would be back in October 17's post)? Well, after two months of beating my brains against this book, I finally get it. Now that's an accomplishment.

(By the way, I'm basically putting in this post all the things I've been meaning to blog about for a week but haven't had time to type up.)

It's always funny to me to finish a paper and compare the finished work with all the weeks of stress I've had about it. It doesn't seem that overwhelming in retrospect. And, to be honest, the number of hours involved isn't really all that excessive. The thing is, though, writing a seminar paper is not about regurgitating information. It's not like I've been gathering all these facts and ideas throughout the term and now I just have to spit them back in a paper. That's what its about as an undergrad. That's what essay exams are all about: organize the ideas you've discussed over the term into some kind of unified thesis and expand on it for X number of pages. It's about gathering and applying knowledge.

In grad school, it's about being creative. Think of it like a board game. You are on a journey to find just one thing in the course of the term that you don't think any one else has ever thought of before. [Place your playing piece on Start.] This usually (for me) takes the form of a random, as-yet formless connection: "Huh, this kind of reminds me of that." [Take one step forward.] Then you have to go out and research to see if anyone else has ever made that connection. [Proceed to the library. Skip several turns.] If not (and keep in mind the exponentially-increasing number of articles and dissertations on every author ever published), then you have to magically transform that tenuous connection you thought of into a coherent assertion that can be supported by textual evidence. [Proceed to the Loop of Trial-and-Error.] This is where it gets tricky. There are numberless reasons for your assertion to be invalidated. To name a few:

1) Your professor doesn't like it. They don't have to give a reason. "This is a poor reading of the text," is good enough. [Start over.]

2) When you've finally got an assertion, it occurs to you that you read something kind of like this during your research [Return to the library.] Oops, someone actually has thought of this before. [Start over.]

3) There's not enough textual evidence to support your assertion. Your assertion doesn't really apply after all to the novel or poem you're writing about. However, this one doesn't necessarily disqualify you: [Draw a Card: "Has your professor read the work you're writing about? If YES, Start over. If NO, proceed with caution.]
4) You find an article or book that completely disproves your assertion. [CHOICE: If you pretend you never found the article, spin the wheel to see if the Professor notices the omission. If you acknowledge the article, Start over.]

5) The topic expands into a much bigger paper than you have time to write. It turns out EVERYONE has written on this topic and there are a million things to deal with in order to prove your assertion. [If you write the paper anyway, circle the board three more times. If you try to revise the assertion to limit the topic, return to the Loop of Trial-and-Error.]

6) You can find no outside research about your topic at all. [Roll the dice: "12" means you've hit the jackpot! A completely original idea--you're in dissertation territory. Anything you produce will carry the carte blanche of "Future Dissertation." Numbers "1-11" mean you're out in left field. Start over.]

If you avoid all these pitfalls, you still have to write the paper, which means hunting through your work for the most appropriate quotes to support your assertion. [Draw a card: "Quote on page 14 only supports your topic if taken out of context. Do you try for another or attempt to justify your interpretation of the quote with some post-structuralist juggling?"] Then organize everything into some kind of order and come up with the right balance of academic-but-not-pretentious prose to explain and locate each quote in your argument. [Draw a card: "Your professor insists that he prefers simple, clear writing, but his previous students tell you he's actually impressed by big words and complicated constructions: Which do you use?] And don't even get me started on coming up with a title--I hated titles back in high school when they didn't even have colons.

So, there you are: navigating the game of seminar papers.

So, really, all the stress comes from having to constantly tap into the creative side of your brain where all the different elements you've been thinking about magically combine to form some amazing new insight, which will help you to figure out how to incorporate this or that idea, or what this element of the text means, or what significance you're overall argument has. Sometimes, you really wish for a few quadratic equations to solve or a list of statistics to memorize. And in order to constantly access that place of genius, you come up with all these rituals that will hopefully help you recreate that moment of epiphany. "When I win a game of four-card Spider Solitaire, I will be able to write the next paragraph." Or "if I'm sitting in the perfect coffeeshop with a Vanilla Latte and my green pen, my outline will come together." Or "when the bathroom is clean and the dishes are washed, I'll be able to focus on my introduction."

And then... one morning, when the impending deadline forces you to leave all the distractions of your apartment and computer behind, and you sit down at a table in Barnes & Noble with a blank piece of paper, something clicks and you start writing, and five or six pages later you look up at the clock and its been four hours and your paper is half written.

You suspicious types will be saying to me, "well, why didn't you just do that in the first place? You could have had the paper written a week ago if you'd really wanted to." All I have to say to you is, no, I couldn't. I don't know why, but somehow it takes the whole process, Spider Solitaire and all. No one wishes more than I that I could sit down and hammer out a paper in an efficient, mechanical way, but it doesn't happen. It's a mystery.

On the other hand, one area of my life that certainly could use more discipline is my alarm clock habits. My senior year at NNU, I always got up the first time the alarm clock rang. (I shared a room with four other girls, so there were already alarms ringing all morning without having some of them ring more than once.) But somehow I was conscious enough to ignore everyone else's alarm and listen to my own. Now, when my alarm clock goes off, all I'm conscious of is, bad noise! Make it stop! Make the bad noise stop! Which means that I hit snooze like 15 times before I get up. Which I realize is completely inefficient. Obviously, if I just slept the extra half-hour without the alarm I would get more rest. But at night when I set the alarm I have more faith in my ability to get up early and get lots done then when 7am actually rolls around. *Sigh* Something needs to be done.

Well, there you go. A nice long post to last you awhile, since I'll be starting paper #2 tonight, to be finished *hopefully* by Friday. At which point I will go to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with utter and complete happiness in my heart.

Labels: grad school

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