The last few weeks have been dominated by Operation Treetopper, my efforts to ensure that I close the year out successfully. Operation Treetopper started basically the moment that Operation Marketplace, my plan to avoid mid-semester complacency and ensure I was squared away when picking classes for next semester, ended. Operation Marketplace, in turn, followed Operation Overture, which covered the first few weeks of college classes. The point is that Treetopper has been a culmination of slightly more than seven months of effort and planning.
The two primary objectives of Operation Treetopper were my German final exam, and my Sociology final paper. The German exam was fairly straightforward. I do my best to avoid serious studying for tests, because at least in my experience, it tends to do me more harm than good. Instead, I focus on learning any material that I haven’t already learned, because even though I miraculously avoiding missing class, there were a handful of occasions when circumstances conspired to prevent me from learning the material, and I had to bluff my way through assignments.
Once that’s done, I make sure I know my German by putting on the top hits list for German speaking countries, and reading Der Spiegel, which translates as The Mirror, and is a major newspaper akin to the Times. I know that I’m making progress when I find the music distracting me from reading. I only ever find the music distracting when the words I’m hearing cross wires with words I’m reading or writing, so when the foreign songs cross that threshold, I know my brain has absorbed enough German that it considers them to be part of a language rather than just words. I don’t know if everyone’s brain works that way, or if it’s just mine, but this is how I pull off learning new languages without studying.
My sociology paper was another story entirely.
With retrospect, I can safely say that I overdid it for my sociology final paper. I mean that in both a positive and negative way. I picked a topic that I was really passionate about, which proved fertile for both research and commentary, and in the process created far more work for myself than was necessary or even prudent.
With the benefit of retrospect, and having gotten a few glimpses of what other classmates eventually settled on, there are things I would’ve done differently. Off the bat, I would’ve started earlier. I wouldn’t say I procrastinated, because I gave myself more time than I thought I’d need. Except, I severely underestimated the amount of time and effort this project would require, and the number of documents, pages, spreadsheets, tables, and graphs it would generate for me to juggle and cull down into a final paper.
Case in point: the assignment was to write four or five pages, and I assumed that I would have to fall back on my old authorial filibustering knack to fill space. In reality, I wound up barely butchering the final product down to five pages of writing, plus an additional eighteen pages of tables, graphs, data, and references that had to be put in an annex because I couldn’t fit them in the main paper, but needed them to make my point succinctly.
Also with the full benefit of hindsight, I would have been well served to take the professor up on his offer to meet and discuss refining and operationalizing topics for my survey. I didn’t do this because I thought my topic was already a sufficiently niche topic that it didn’t need refining. I was wrong about this, partly because, as previously mentioned, I vastly underestimated the length it would take to tackle my topic, but also partially because I expected that I would be working on well-trodden ground, scientifically, when in fact, near as I could tell from the literature review, my investigation proved to be fairly novel.
The other reason I didn’t want to refine my topic was because I was excited about it. I knew that I wanted to tackle medical identification and the factors going into adherence essentially since the moment I read the syllabus, and saw that we could do a survey for our paper. I knew it was topical to the course, and I knew that my background with the topic would enable me to write a paper that would earn me a good grade pretty much regardless of the details, but more than that, I wanted to tackle the topic. I was excited to use my newfound skills to tackle a real problem from my life that profoundly affects people I care about.
This is, at least for me, the point of education. It’s why I go to class, even when I don’t feel well, or have better things to do. I want to learn, so that I can fix the world. And in my experience, when an exciting topic like this appears fully-formed, those are usually the best projects. Because whether or not they wind up getting the best score, they make the work of an assignment fun, and they’re good opportunities to learn something.
Moreover, this enthusiasm shows in the end product. There’s sometimes a trade off if following the thing you’re interested in means bending the criteria of the assignment (see again: twenty-three pages instead of five), but I’ve always found this to be a worthwhile trade off it it means I can give my best effort on something I care about. And I think most teachers feel the same way.
I don’t regret my choice of topic. And understanding that I made them based on what I knew at the time, I don’t regret the decisions I made about my paper. My biggest, and really only, complaint with the end product, is that I overestimated how long five pages was, and had to cut down my writing when I quite would’ve enjoyed expounding further on the results.
Operation Treetopper has accomplished something that I wasn’t sure was possible- I have been able to declare victory for the end of the semester without any lingering make-up assignments, or uncertainty about whether I’m really done. It’s anticlimactic, and a little unreal to me. But it’s the best Christmas gift I could have wished for, and it gives me hope that next year can be even better.