I had a class (Unit Operations Lab) as a Senior where we had a lab writeup due every week that averaged 40-pages. The longest was 89, the shortest was 19. It was written in groups, and my group split it up into sections, but when I was group leader, I did nothing else. The calculations were due on Friday, the sections written were due on Sunday. The final paper was due (bound) on Monday at 1:00. Then, the teacher didn't return the writeups until the end of the semester. So if you did anything wrong, you didn't know and were consistently wrong. That was a miserable semester.
that blows. did the teacher even go through them in detail, or was there just a couple marks on the papers and a grade. I've dont those research papers that took forever and then i'd get it back and there would be next to no feedback.
Some profs relish producing hell for the common student. I'm convinced that they discuss ways and means over beers at a bar with their fellow masochists, chuckling the entire time. Survive it, come to know the academic sadist, get in smaller, advanced courses, and you might find that they are actual human beings who care. Maybe, maybe no.
I don't think he went through them very carefully. We worried less and less about getting them correct and just did it as quickly as possible as the semester went along.
He was a really nice prof. He would be up at the school until any hour helping us (even in other classes). He'd go to the boats with the gamblers occasionally. But his assignments were absolutely brutal. In the other class (Reaction Kinetics, a Chem Eng geek class) that I took from him, he prided himself in giving tests that no one could pass. He liked to have to add 50% as a curve.
And several of us graciously gave you some ideas. However, using an idea to start your own paper and using a paper already written by someone else are two entirely different things. And FinalsBound... perhaps I'm from a different era, but sending him a paper and encouraging him to use it is not cool. And by the way, my MA thesis came in at 86 pages and is the longest thing I've ever written, but it took me 10 months.
That is kind of an odd number - what discipline? Mine was something like 120 and I wrote it in 3 months but looking back I really wish I had taken longer.
Here Here!!! My thesis came in at 84 pages + Graphs + Appendix and it was written in spanish. I loved the sense of accomplishment after every major writing project. Plus, I really enoy researching and analyzing info. My friends in the UT-Austin Buisness program would complain about 10 pagers as if thier world was crumbling. One girl never even set foot in the Library during her first three years. She was using the internet as her primary source. This is very commom with BA majors.
to be fair, i don't think i ever used a library for my master's thesis. i either googled all the websites i used for statistical stuff or used the SPE website for SPE papers for the petroleum engineering stuff (and googled some of that as well or occasionally used textbooks). i think it was about 70 pages of writing (including the figures within the writing) + 10 pages of derivation crap + another 70 of these big ass tables. i at least had to format and create the tables (it was hard trying to get 17 columns to fit on one page and still make them legible) and it was necessary to include them, so they weren't completely free pages, but they were nice for padding the final page count. (edit: i take that back, i do remember going to the engineering library once, but i don't think i even ended up using anything from it.) i remember our senior plant project group paper came in at 220+ pages. of course, that included 100+ pages worth of MSDS sheets b/c they told us to put it all in there and each chemical had about 6 pages worth of stuff so we just printed them all and stuffed them in there. it was really only 60+ of writing. we could barely bind the damn thing when we turned it in. and for whoever had to turn in 40 page labs each week, man that sucks. at least in the lab with the biggest write-ups (FunLab) we did it every 2 weeks. the week in between it was always so nice to realize you weren't going to be up all night tuesday hammering it out.
Every Chemical Engineer that I knew from other schools had similar writeups, but they were every other week. Most schools either cut the class to 6 total labs or split it into two semesters.
US History. My paper was on the Farm Loan program in the Progressive Era and how WWI changed the assumptions about farm economics in the Wilson Administration. Lots of research in the UVA archives, in DC, and several other repositories around the SEC region. Google wasn't even a dream. I used notecards and wrote the whole damn thing on a Compaq Portable with a vision wrecking screen: And I used these: (I still have the Compaq: 4.77 MHz 8088 processor, 128k of RAM, a single full-height 320k 5-1/4" floppy disk, and a built-in 9-inch green monochrome monitor.)
That sounds more like o-chem lab than unit ops. Holy **** those labs sucked. I swore if I had one more o-chem lab I was changing majors. Unit operations lab was ~20 page reports, every 1 to 2 weeks depending on the project length. Allow me to pile on the thread-starter as well. I have three 10-page papers all due by the end of April. One of which needs to be friggin "academic journal" quality.
The discussion between francisfan4l1f3 and finalsbound on how to get the paper done in this thread is priceless.
Good lord. I remember building an Altair 8080 for my father. Ancient stuff. It's like looking back at the Wright Brothers.
i saw a video where a guy made all the periods in his paper to size 14 (originally 12). it was done with a 16 page paper and it came out to be 19 pages when he was done.
I TA'ed Organic Chem lab. Ours was much easier. Lab reports were under 10 pages. I basically taught, and I took it easy on them.
