Student Lyfe

I dropped off the blogging planet for a little while during essay season. Essay season begins the end of February and ends the middle of May. It's like hunting season, but different in every single way. If I knew how to draw a Venn diagram in this blogging program to compare essay season to hunting season I would, but probably the only thing in that middle area would be the word "season". All that to say, I've turned in three beautifully crafted essays and one statstical analysis writeup, and I only cried once. Just kidding. Actually I did, but it's because I fell walking to school, and it really hurt. Turns out short cuts still aren't always the way to go. The good news is that despite the massive bruise on my hip, I managed to not spill my to-mug of coffee, and very few people were around to witness my grace. 

In recompense for the lack of blogs for the past several months, I offer instead an insider's perspective at the process of essay writing. Please be warned that the following images have not been edited, staged, or in any other way modified to facilitate my mother being anything but horrified at my state of living. 

Essays tend to begin as lengthy emails to professors. Sometimes this includes the thesis statement for the whole project. Usually it involves a somewhat vague idea I've been dreaming about for a while and several citations of past research. After settling on a topic with the professor come days or weeks of reading and reading and reading. Sometimes it's not so bad, and it looks like this: 

But when you get the mass of double sided papers together, even without the books involved, for one essay it's a little like this: 

(I put a filter on that to make it look cooler.)

After reading, the embryonic essay moves to the mirror. This is where I map out the main ideas and different authors' concepts and how they go together. It's like a glorified outline. Brace yourselves for the savage barbarism and unadorned reality that is final essays living (Sorry, Mom!):

This lasts for several days (weeks) during which I survive on peanut butter, apples, and coffee. And sometimes baked butternut squash with pesto, feta, and pomegranate seeds. Writers gotta eat. Mike and Gill Poole rescued me from this involuntary vegetarianism and fed me a proper roast dinner, and that was the best essay break ever! 

Sometimes I write note cards instead of mirror outlines for my sources. The mirror is good for more theoretical papers with confusing interrelations of terms, but if I have a large number of sources, I need notecards to keep them straight. This also allows me to color code them by topic and number them, so they're almost exactly in the order I want to use them in the essay. It looks like this:

And on nights (ok, it happened one time) that I stay up all night in the library, it looks a little like this:

And library snacks, which apparently I thought I was packing for a family of four:

And that, dear peruser of blogs, is why you've had no blog entries for two months. And now I'm off to study for my final exam that's in a week.