<p>oh dear ****ing god, i really need to get going on this 30 page essay that's due in a few days. ::heading to school now::</p>
<p>merry christmas!</p>
<p>[awesome. you see? current students -- use this thread to give prospectives an idea of what to expect!]</p>
<p>This "ITT, _____ discuss _______" sounds awfully auto-admitish.</p>
<p>Why do you have a 30 page essay, let alone write a 30 page essay over the break? In my time at CU, I never had to write anything that was more than 9 pages!</p>
<p>seriously? this is my 6th 20+ page paper of the semester, and the prof put it off until the end so we wouldn't have to work on it during finals.</p>
<p>xoxo hth</p>
<p>FYI, WindowShopping is a tremendous grind. He writes much more than is required by most classes, which is only dimly correlated to better grades.</p>
<p>By comparison, i've written maybe one paper over 10 pages in my 4 years at columbia (a 25-page applied math research paper), and probably half a dozen in the 5-10pg range over all 4 years.</p>
<p>....i would imagine applied math isnt very writing intensive</p>
<p>well no, but i mean, i took Ken Jackson's history of NYC course and ended up writing an 8-page paper. Took Bollinger's first-amendment class and didn't have to write squat. By comparison, WindowShopping here wrote - what? - 50 pages maybe for Bollinger, all of detailed notes. I preferred to just remember the stuff, learn how to think like a lawyer, and do equally well in the class.</p>
<p>At columbia, an acceptable alternative to grinding out metric tons of output is knowing how to think, with depth and agility, and remember lots of details from what you hear in class, read in books, and go over with TAs. I'd say in my experience that columbia divides about 50-50; half the student body, give or take, is the brilliant type who uses that to enable them to be (relatively) lazy, get by with minimal work, etc... and half is the type who has always needed to work their ass off to get by (despite being smart in their own right), and continue to do so in college.</p>
<p>Denzera doesn't tell you that his <em>awesome</em> TA docked him two whole letter grades for writing 8 pages in the NYC course when I think maybe 2 pages were asked for (granted, mine was 10, and I didn't get a reduction). I think I wrote maybe 80 pages of notes for Bollinger, typed, but I really enjoyed the material and didn't need to refer to the text once on the exams. Besides, the notes prepared me well for my First Amendment seminar. Remember, I'm a polisci major and Denzera was a SEAS something major.</p>
<p>This paper I'm writing through right now is assigned as somewhere between 20-40 pages (wide range, huh?). It's also a seminar paper, meaning the grade on the paper determines the grade in the course, and it's a 4-credit course, and that "4" looks really nice right now given my other submitted grades for the term...</p>
<p>I should also add that I only went over on papers in one class this semester. I don't want to say the class or the professor, but if you were to CULPA, you'd find that most students write 20+ pages for his "10-12 page" papers. All of my other papers have been within the required range. Graduate and seminar level humanities classes tend to rely more on long term papers than on exams. When I'm done with this paper, I'll have written about 200 pages this semester.</p>
<p>Oh, my Jackson TA sucked balls, there's no question. Horace Grant... who names their kid Horace? Good thing he went to Yale or he would've gotten pushed into lockers.</p>
<p>By the end of the semester, I loved my TA and leader of the Graduate Student Socialist movement or something. Not all TAs treat their students equally, sadly. Professors should really work on parity (and some probably do), but someone like KJ probably didn't care. It's a risk you take when you sign up for a class with 450 students.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Horace Grant... who names their kid Horace?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>....haha, like the basketball player</p>