Yesterday I turned in my last paper as an undergraduate student. It was an 8-pager on the tensions between individual and communal readings of identity in Nitozake Shange's For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf and ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. I just barely managed to squeak it in under the length limit, and I turned it in to the amazingly brilliant and talented professor Bahareh Lampert.
The paper's fine and I'm not too worried about talking about it today. Were there things wrong with it? Sure. I don't think that any piece of writing is ever "done". Hopefully you get to a point where you decide it's publishable and you convince yourself you're finished, but I think that even the greatest works of literature the world has ever seen could stand another revision or two ;) Suffice it to say I am fairly proud of it and I have done my very best to overcome a lot of the common errors that have plagued my writing since high school, and this paper definitely looks better than the stuff i wrote five years ago, so I would say that I have learned something at least.
Turning that paper in drove the point home more than I thought it would, though. This is it. This is the end of my time as an undergrad. After this, or rather after my final exams next week, I will be able to walk and receive my diploma. I will be educated. I have tried not to think of my education in the same way people tend to think about birthdays, that they are one age for 364 days and then on the 365th they suddenly become one year older, but at least for a moment yesterday education wasn't an incremental, lifelong process that I was simply directly facilitating by going to a university. It was something specific, something measurable, that I have put 20 years of my life into (counting preschool) and that will soon be completed. And when it's over, I'm going to take a brief break, and continue on into the "real world". It's all very exciting!
The paper's fine and I'm not too worried about talking about it today. Were there things wrong with it? Sure. I don't think that any piece of writing is ever "done". Hopefully you get to a point where you decide it's publishable and you convince yourself you're finished, but I think that even the greatest works of literature the world has ever seen could stand another revision or two ;) Suffice it to say I am fairly proud of it and I have done my very best to overcome a lot of the common errors that have plagued my writing since high school, and this paper definitely looks better than the stuff i wrote five years ago, so I would say that I have learned something at least.
Turning that paper in drove the point home more than I thought it would, though. This is it. This is the end of my time as an undergrad. After this, or rather after my final exams next week, I will be able to walk and receive my diploma. I will be educated. I have tried not to think of my education in the same way people tend to think about birthdays, that they are one age for 364 days and then on the 365th they suddenly become one year older, but at least for a moment yesterday education wasn't an incremental, lifelong process that I was simply directly facilitating by going to a university. It was something specific, something measurable, that I have put 20 years of my life into (counting preschool) and that will soon be completed. And when it's over, I'm going to take a brief break, and continue on into the "real world". It's all very exciting!
