Not with a bang but with a whimper; or, I have become the student I hated

I just (just! as in, about 7 minutes ago! technically 19 minutes late! agh!) turned in a paper that is SUCH a piece of crap. Crappity crap crap crap. 

Thing is, it had the potentially to be pretty decent - not, maybe, earth-shattering in scope, but a nice little exegesis of this one legal issue. It was a discrete topic, on a sort of timely question, dealing with a very manageable set of sources. It coulda been a contender!

But I ran out of time.

So instead, it's one of those papers I'm sure many of you, my academic peeps, are familiar with: a good student (because yes, I am a good student; of course, most people in law school are good students) with a potentially good idea, and the ability to pull it off - who just doesn't. Because she runs out of time.

I can tell you right now at least seventeen things wrong with this paper: 

• there are a bunch of sections with NO TRANSITIONS BETWEEN THEM whatsoever. I just stopped writing one thing and started writing another.
• I also totally did that thing a wise blogger (which one, I can't remember) described recently, where you had all these notes to yourself of further things to look up and cite properly and add examples and so on, and you just cut them all because you didn't have time.
• The prof made a bunch of very good suggestions and I wasn't able to address all (okay, many) of them (and one I "addressed" with one of those "subject X is beyond the scope of this essay" lines. Such BS!).
• I don't think what I say in the introduction really matches what I end up doing in the body of the paper.
• There isn't really a conclusion. Well, unless you count bringing up an entirely new point and saying, "and THIS is why [X] will never work." So yeah, no conclusion.
• Oh, and the title sucks. It's a really great title for the paper I originally thought I was writing. But I don't think it works for the version I turned in AT ALL. 

 AUGH. AUGH. AUGH. 

I mean, these are such rookie mistakes! I know exactly where and what they are. I just didn't allow myself enough time not to make them. I could kick myself. I do - I DO kick myself.

But you know, being a student kind of sucks. Because there's something structural about being a student, even at this level, even for me, who knows better about what I need to do to be a good student and write a successful paper, that makes you do things at the last minute and do only what you need to do to fulfill requirements. 

I mean, there are definitely people in my class who were more on the ball with this paper than I was, who I'm sure turned in papers with things like TRANSITIONS and CONCLUSIONS and what have you. And yes, I tend toward the last-minute and lazy. I own my inadequacies, yo.

But still. Being a student feels qualitatively different from what it was like to be a prof, and to write my OWN papers for my OWN research agenda, that I controlled. 

Yes, I picked this course, and I picked the paper topic, blah blah blah. But in the end, I'm doing everything I do in law school because I HAVE to. There is a structure in place, a machine, and I am just the product grinding through the cogs. (Whoa, random Mario Savio reference there.) As a prof, I decided whether I was going to go to this conference, or that conference, or what and when I would write and submit and so on. Sure, I needed to write and apply for stuff to succeed in my profession, but I controlled a lot more of how and when I did it than I do as a student.

(I'm also laughing at myself right now because I sound way too much like two people from my past: the student who wrote on a fellow TA's evaluation that there shouldn't be reading assignments, the student should just be able to read when s/he felt like it; and a grad school colleague who used to bemoan the tyranny of deadlines, and to say that she could do really excellent work if she could do it on her own schedule, rather than on the arbitrary semester-based schedule of the professors/grad program. To which sentiment the rest of my grad cohort and I weren't very sympathetic, because, duh! you signed up for grad school! what did you think it would be like?

And I signed up for law school! What did I think it would be like? I mean, you'd think I'd have known, right?)

It's just really weird feeling yourself boxed in by this structure to which you must conform, these school requirements, and feeling yourself react in ways that you know, intellectually, may not be the most productive. I have way more sympathy for all the ghosts of my past students than I did when I was teaching - I KNOW why profs do what they do, and why they require students to do all this kind of crap, and even so, I find myself resentful, and petulant, and cutting corners, and doing the minimum required to get the results I want. I find myself thinking in terms of "us" (students) and "them" (everyone else).

Being a student just MAKES you this way. It just does.

But the upside to my paper angst: my semester is now officially OVER!!!! (If you'll pardon me, I have a long-overdue date with some Thai food and my DVR...)

Comments

[Seeking Solace]

Cut yourself some slack. You are human. Now, go enjoy that Thai food!

[Notorious Ph.D.]

That is *so* not seventeen.

(seriously -- congrats on finishing. It probably sucks less than my last three Kalamazoo papers.)

[David Schraub]

The wise blogger you're thinking of is Bill Araiza.

And as a fellow law student, I absolutely sympathize.

[Rana]

Ah, but you see - you have one (dis)advantage over other students - you know it's not the professor's fault.

But the most important thing is - YOU'RE DONE! Go do something FUN!

[Dr. Crazy]

You. Must. Chill. Remember that you are submitting your paper alongside all of the other people in your class. Remember that the things you're describing are things that instructors *see all the time*. The fact that you're remembering ghosts of students' past is actually getting in your way here - not helping you. Remember back to when you were a professor. REALLY remember it. Remember how you understood that things like what you're describing do happen, and how they don't necessarily mean that a paper is a big fat fail. Especially when you read other papers that fail on a much larger scale. Remember how even a fairly mediocre effort from a great student could still, as a professor, make you feel like you did the right thing. And remember the sort of grade that you assigned to that student. Not as a gift, but because you got how they came to turning that thing in.

Here's the thing. You've submitted it. There's nothing you can do to change it now. So you should just celebrate being done - not knowing the outcome. BUT. I have a hard time believing that what you submitted wasn't at least in some tiny way superb. Or, let's say it wasn't. EVEN if it wasn't, that wouldn't be the end of law school for you, or the end of you progressing forward. Look, you rock. YOU TOTALLY ROCK. School sucks, but professors do know that school sucks, and they know the reasons why. You SHALL soldier on.

[Doctor Moonbeam]

Congrats for having finished!

[helenesch]

Yay on being DONE! You're like 2/3 of the way done with law school now, right? (and the worst parts are behind you...). I can't help but wonder, too, as I read this, whether your work is really doing all the things you feel like it's doing. I frequently think my own writing is crap, and then (at least sometimes) re-read it and realize it's a lot better than I thought.

In any case, go out and do something fun!

[julie]

Well, someone needs to be in the bottom quartile...lol

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Thanks for tolerating my freakout, everyone! (It's kind of obvious I wrote this at the very end of the semester, isn't it?) We'll have to see what happens with this paper.

And hi Julie and David! David, thanks for remembering who said that - what's really funny to me is that I was sure it had to be one of the (many) non-law professors I know, it didn't even occur to me that it came from a law-prof blog! Guess my reading patterns have changed in the last couple of years...

[rokeya]

I have to say that I appreciate this kind of honest, insightful post so much. It almost makes me less passionately angry about the constant stream of "students are stupid" posts I see.