Below is a segment from my former University of Phoenix blog. I have since rolled the blog into my main blog for posterity.
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Finally, at long last, my work has been submitted and I am free.
So what in the hell happened? Good question.
For starters, I'm not looking to pass the buck. I place the blame on myself. I had a paper due last night (Monday night). Technically, our assignments aren't due until 7am the following day, since our professor is cool and she won't get to reading them until she's awake anyhow. She gives us that flexibility.
We also had a group assignment Monday night. With a glance at the syllabus, I assumed it would be a pushover assignment, the typical busy-work one could expect from a graduate-level university that doesn't require physical togetherness, only the virtual sort. This was far from the case.
Our meeting was set at 9pm, and by 1:30am, we were finally getting things together. We turned it in, broke up for the night and I started my paper at 2. The assignment was to create a hypothetical workplace scenario where conflict occurs and to analyze the stages of conflict using theories from the text, create a dispute resolution and defend it, indicate any repercussions, etc. I had one page done by 3:30am. Most of that time was spent wiping my eyes and yawning. I couldn't stay up much longer, but I wasn't going to lose any points.
It got to 3:45 before I realized that I had failed to plan this out correctly. I was fading quickly. I had been writing all night, reviewing our text (a four-part PDF, with 300 pages each) for citations, and sitting in the quiet room in an uncomfortable chair, still sitting in my own sweat from a workout. I decided to take a 20 minute power nap and get back to work when I woke back up again.
Twenty minutes later, I was up and walking around. Now more tired than I was before I had taken the nap, I knew this wouldn't be pretty. I opened up the laptop once again to get going. I wrote another paragraph. Exhausted, I tried again with the nap. "I'll set it for thirty minutes and finish this," I said to myself. I was up at 4:35. I slapped the snooze bar. Nine minutes later, I was almost upside-down in my bed. The alarm went off and I smacked it with a thud. "Heh. 4:44. That's pretty cool." Now even more delerious, I took another stab at the paper.
The night sky had turned to a bright blue. Birds were chirping outside my bedroom window. I knew that this paper wouldn't get finished if I were this tired. I couldn't research something if I couldn't keep my eyes open. I set my alarm for 6am to give myself one final hour and slammed back into bed.
The phone rang at 9:54am. I got a shower and went into the classroom newsgroup. Everyone was already commenting on everyone else's papers. I double-checked to make sure our groupwork got submitted in time. Everything was okay. No emergencies.
I went to the basement for another workout and then came back to the paper.
The dreaded paper.
Six hours later, I had written four pages of this paper. I decided that I wasn't going to beat a dead horse. I was done. I had already lost 5 points of a possible 6 for being late, so what's the use in making that last point really shine?
Group work started back up with a meeting at 8:30 last night. We were done at midnight. I did the final proofreading (my specialty among the other two in the group) and turned it in. This assignment was the make-it or break-it group project. Team B didn't fare so well. Out of four people, the final project was handed in by one person. I'm not sure just yet, but I think four people have dropped out of our 9-person class.
And after the day I had yesterday, I had almost thought about that as well. It would have been easy to do. I would have wrapped up my complaints in a pretty little memo, shipped it off to my professor and the Dean of my college, called Wells Fargo about the school loan, and said "Screw it all."
I'm still here though. Tonight, I have to recap the week's progress in a quickie 350-word paper. I'll be sure to mention the hell I put myself through.
Posted by admin at July 16, 2003 12:05 PM