We've all done it. We find out we have a paper due in two weeks and think, "I have plenty of time."
But, two weeks becomes one week.
One week becomes three days.
Three days turns into five hours.
And then, it seems like your life is over.
You question why you procrastinate all the time. You wonder what would happen if you were a better student who didn't spend a significant amount of your free time scrolling through Twitter and binge watching Netflix.
In the grand scheme of things, though, you don't actually hate yourself. You just hate the fact that procrastination is your favorite hobby. Had you written the paper sooner, you could be sleeping instead of staying up all night to type a paper you really don't even want to be writing in the first place.
You call yourself many different choice words because all you want to be doing is sleeping. If you're like Michael Scott, you'll probably refer to yourself as an "ignorant slut" once or twice before your night is over.
By the time you finally work up the energy to start, you realize you have done none of the necessary research and it's going to be harder than you think. You have no clue where to start, even though you try to convince yourself that you do.
So you start. In really desperate times, you turn to the place that all professors hate the most.
Because everything you read on the internet is true, right? By this point in time, you are about ready to start typing. Sometimes, it doesn't go as planned and you feel like you are not making any sense at all. Most of the time, you think that because it's true. You probably aren't really as knowledgeable about the topic as your professors would like to think you are, so this tends to be the hardest step.
As the process continues, you finally find your way and start making progress on the essay that you should have gotten done a week earlier. Since you're starting to get extremely tired, your emotions become heightened. Tears are normal, and sometimes throwing something across the room will make you feel a little better.
As you get closer to finishing the paper itself, you start to realize that citations are necessary, otherwise you'll probably get kicked out of school for plagiarizing, which isn't good. No one wants that. Unless they don't want to write papers anymore, although it is still not a good option. Sometimes, EasyBib is a lifesaver. Other times, you have to manually do your citations and that leads to you thinking:
When you finally finish, you have never been happier, but you are also drained of all of your energy.
But, although you feel crappy, never forget that there are ways to make things better.
And unlike trying to write a paper the night before, ice cream is never a bad decision.
