#HonorsProblems – Your First College Paper

This week’s #HonorsProblems post is written by former UHPer and Peer Advisor Kerry Lanzo (now fabulous alum making the UHP proud!) 
You’ve been building up to this moment your whole life, it seems, from the first time you read Go, Dog, Go! to just last month, when you bought that shiny new laptop for college. You approach: your desk awaits, piled high with spiral notebooks, torn bits of paper littered with brilliant thoughts, and library books that bring the smell of intelligent Gelman mold to your dorm room. Your class notes are perfectly outlined and all quotations highlighted in an inspirational neon yellow. It all awaits you, glowing with the effervescent promise of success.
This is it: your first college paper.
But as you sit down in your standard-issue wooden chair, the highlighter appears lurid to your sleepy eyes and your Word Doc screen stares back at you, mockingly blank. You freeze. You stare at the prompt and shuffle pages of your books: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? You beg answers from Plato’s ancient garble. Plato could probably write an A+ Origins paper if he only used proper modern punctuation and citations.

Nevertheless, the words begin flowing. But by 5am, you’re asking yourself existential questions: is my future worth sacrificing to this paper? If I dropped out of college, could I become a billionaire startup owner? Would this paper lead me to eudemonia if only Socrates would speak in plain English and answer the actual question? You hand it in the next day, ready to forget it all happened in the few weeks it takes for your professor to grade it.
FLASH FORWARD. You’d almost forgotten about it. Your life had meaning again. And then… your professor hands it back, and in your trembling hands, the red pen resembles the blood of the innocent, splattered across the page as if sacrificed to some Babylonian Thunder God. “See me” it says at the end, and you wonder what horrors await students with a poor grade in the dark cave of mystery that is your professor’s office.

You reflect on your life choices. What could you have done to avoid the pain and suffering?

• Seek out your savvy Peer Advisor. They’ve been there. They’ve done that. They’ve succeeded. They’ve failed.  Email them and ask to have coffee: bring an outline, bring a draft, bring your pain. Like Mr. Miyagi, their wisdom can magically heal you.
• GO TO OFFICE HOURS. Professors really are human, we promise. They answer questions, and they’ll send your mind reeling by asking you some pretty good ones, too. They’ll explain language that doesn’t quite seem like English and they’ll clarify the prompt. They’ve written a few essays in their day, you know. There is no taking back questions you’ve never asked.
• Start early! You cannot replace the good, old-fashioned value of time spent thinking.

Above all, do not panic. By senior year, you won’t remember this paper, but you’ll remember the skills you learned from it. You’ll look down at the shy Honors first-years in three years and think, “Oh, how I’ve grown.” For now, take the opportunity to get to know your professors, get to know your study habits, and best of all, when to ask for help.
Good luck! May the odds be ever in your favor.