What a skanky acetate!*

* You guessed it! This is another prof quote. One of the funniest I've heard all year. This is right up there with "That's a dumb-shit idea," uttered in GIS lab last quarter. We were eavesdropping, sort of. It caused us to convulse in giggles for quite some time. (it was the manner of delivery, mostly, that made it so funny.) I have no idea what the dumb-shit idea was... The skanky acetate, however, I can elaborate on. He was complaining about his transparancy. It had been corrupted, apparently... ;-)

Urgh. I'm supposed to be writing a paper. I always seem to be writing papers. I'm a wannabe scientist! What's up with that? I somehow managed to take at least 5 writing in the major (WIM) classes at Stanford. One of them wasn't even biology! It was IR. Yech. Though that prof was an aging hippie, and thought that I should publish that paper. Really flattering, but no thank you =). It wasn't that great of a paper. Only got an A-. Kind of mixed signals, huh? He mostly liked it because I'd cheated and made about half of it about the science which is the basis for (and should be driving) the policy, since that's what I knew (I'd written a paper about it the year before, in yet another of those WIM classes). Because of its science-heaviness, my paper didn't just rehash stuff he already knew. Apparently the prof likes learning knew things =). That's good!

Most of the WIM classes I took only had one paper though. Pretty much what made them WIM classes was that you'd have to turn in a draft, which would be returned to you with critiques. Kind of like the peer review process I guess. Only the professors aren't peers... Of course, there was the exception of bio lab, for which we had to write 3 papers each quarter. But those were just lab reports. Extremely formulaic. You didn't even have to write them well. You'd pass as long as you had all the parts the TAs were looking for. I know. I TAed it last year. Which is unfortunate, because it's the only WIM class most biology majors will ever take. And let me tell you, it's a misconception to think that all Stanford students can write well just by virtue of having gotten into Stanford. Some of those lab reports I graded were atrocious. Of course, there's the additional problem of students not giving a damn with those... But still. Even when I don't give a damn, I can write clearly and grammatically. Though you may beg to differ on that account =). Oh well. Most of those students were premeds. Do doctors need to write much? Probably not. At least, they never do on ER... Though that whole lack of caring part might be a little unnerving...

Grad school has a lot more papers. Last quarter I had 2 each in 2 classes. This quarter I have 3 in one class, and one in another. But you know, it's ok. I don't actually mind writing papers. Ok, I hate writing them, but I kind of like doing the research for them. So far it's seeming to be the only chance to actually learn something new. All of my classes seem to have a distressing trend of teaching the same things that I've been learning in all of my other classes for the past three years. So paper writing is good. It's also pretty much your only chance to go off on your own, in a direction of your choosing (or sometimes not), and learn as much as you want. Sometimes you learn things that perhaps nobody else in the class knows. Maybe not even the professor (though this probably isn't too likely, as long as the prof isn't an old stoner like that IR one).

But with this paper, I went a little overboard with the research. I read 65 (that's not a typo) papers for it. All within a week too. Of course, they were all relatively short. The average length was probably only about 8 pages, once you subtract off their reference pages (which I did one evening, to see how many pages I'd read for this paper). Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to include all of them in my paper. Some aren't all that relevant. Though I'll try my darnedest! So given that I have a 3 inch stack of papers to incorporate (think of it, 3 inches of paper is a lot!), actually writing my paper is going to be hell. It'll be impossible to find which reference says what when I need it. So to avoid this headache, I spent the weekend preparing to write my paper (I'd finished reading all 65 of my references on Tuesday, and had been slacking off ever since). I figured an annotated bibliography would suit my purposes ideally. Oy! It took a god-awful lot of time. Just typing up all the citations took an exceedingly long time, and I feel I nearly gave myself carpal tunnels doing it. The references alone were 5 pages. When I added all the annotations, it stretched to 18. Maybe I should just turn the annotated bibliography in, and avoid actually writing the paper! Though of course, it would score miserably. Not only does it not synthesize any of the information or make any sense of anything, it vastly exceeds the page limit. Oh well. To recover from the annotated bibliography, I took yesterday evening off to "prepare myself mentally" to write a paper. I watched two movies and finished my fun-book =). Yay!

Ok. I should actually write this paper at some point... I really, really should start it today. But since it's not due till Wednesday, motivation will be difficult.