I’m sure I’ll do Fine
I title this post because while I’m sure they are done with the best intentions, I’m just venting my frustration and I’m sure everything will work out.
On Monday my QP is due. Or it may be that they “are due” I’m really not sure how many are supposed to be done. The assignment is one, but I know that some people turn in two, so I prepared two much to the neglect of my classes that have currently started. The QP is the “Qualifying Paper,” a requirement that I need to jump through in order to get a PhD. It’s basically just another paper that I have to write that has no class attached to it.
My previous foray in Grad school took this differently. After our first semester we have a test, of five essay questions that was due after the first month of our second semester. Again, it took away from the classes that I was supposed to be taking at the time. Why neither school has decided that it might be better to have these things due at the end of the summer, or at the end of the first month of the summer is a question that I may want to bring up should the situation arise where my input is solicited. The exam was a chore, but a chore that made some sense as to the requirements. The QP is extremely vague.
The only requirements we have are the amount of writing (4500-6000 words), that we write an abstract (brief summary of the paper), and have a bibliography. There is nothing indicated that gives us a clue as to what makes a good QP. The only guidance we have is the suggestion that we use a paper previously submitted to a class and make corrections based on the Professor’s remarks. That professor is not supposed to give us guidance on the paper if they know we are to use it as a QP. I don’t know the reasoning behind this.
The trouble is that within the last year or so there was some problem regarding the QPs. Students were turning in amended papers from classes they received an A in. The papers were failing the QP, but that seemed impossible–if they were getting A’s then how were they failing the requirement? Apparently the professor in question was an easy grader, but that still begs the question of how can a paper fail? Were they that badly written, was the professor not even looking at them? Even given that there was an easy grader looking at the papers, how easy must he (I assume as there are only two female professors in the grad school) have been?
I have prepared two papers, one of them for my philosophical issues in biomedicine class and the other from the aesthetics class. I chose the biomedicine paper not because it was my best one, or the one that I like the most, but because it is the paper that I had to rewrite four times. This gives me the confidence that it ought to be ok, I did enough of the research and the writing is definitely good. My only question is that it may not be philosophical enough, most of the paper is spent on studying the bullshit vaccine controversy and cloning but those are philosophical issues-it’s just not metaphysical.
The second, the aesthetic paper, is a bit strange because I just wrote it and am kind of sick of working on it. My trouble with that paper is that my references are not high brow and for some reason I think this may hurt it. Most aesthetic papers deal with concertos and english literature whereas mine references Escape From New York and the Warriors. Again I know that I am psyching myself out. It’s just one of those things that vodka takes care of.
