The Project

I am having serious doubts about long term projects right now. I used to love them because you could work on them a little at a time and not have to be time crunched but I am starting to wonder if that is always true.

If you receive a project at the beginning of the term then you would expect that it wouldn't be to hard to get it done by the end of the term. However you have to make some calculations that wouldn't normally be figured in. The class that project is for isn't the only class you will have during the term and it might not even be the only one giving you a long term project. And that doesn't even cover the normal homework that you will undoubtedly have form all of your classes on a daily basis. With all of these things plus sports, show choir, jobs, and some sort of social life you don't have time to worry about that project that seems such a long way off. That is, at least until it isn't such a long way off. when that day comes and you finally realize that you don't have time to put off the project it is too late. Suddenly you are pulling an all nighter the day before it is due, desperately trying to read the necessary materials and not die of a heart attack from fear and over exhaustion, not to mention the six cups of coffee that have made you so caffeine resistant they don't even do any good. And then you are done. you sit, read it, and then find that you didn't even write down what you were supposed to and you start the whole cycle again. Some would call this procrastination but I don't think that is correct. I view procrastination as a habit of putting off work in the short term sense and then doing it at the last minute. this is when you knew that you needed to do it but you had other priorities that never got finished until you just had to put them aside and work on this at the last minute. People who do this are smart people who are forced into massive amounts of very hard classes by the pressure to be the most intelligent they can be and are almost in over their head with the overwhelming difficulty.