Why will Texas never fall into the ocean? Because Oklahoma sucks.
(no offense to you Oklahomans)
My master’s program doesn’t involve a thesis. Instead, I have to take comprehensive exams, which means on June 1st, I will be sent 3 essay questions from different academic areas within my program. I will have 30 days to write 2,500-3,000 words (10-12 pages) in response to each question.
As I am preparing for my exams, I thought it would be a good idea to ask my most recent history prof (from last month) for any suggestions/tips on my writing. I was expecting him to respond with something addressing the way in which I analyzed and synthesized my research.
Apparently he teaches 4th grade language arts and not master’s level history courses.
Basically, he responded with something along the lines of “make sure you have topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph that have to do with the main point of your paper, and make sure your paragraphs relate to the topic sentence. You did this, so you shouldn’t have any problems.”
Really? REALLY?
Ugh. This is just one more reason why. OU SUCKS.
Hook ’em Horns!!
The interns I have supervised have struggled with writing comprehensive reports. The student from A&M said they didn’t have to write reports in her masters program! Perhaps another hooray for UT!
That’s incredible that she wasn’t required to write reports for he program. Poor Aggies hehe 🙂
On the flip side, that actually makes a masters degree sound like a good idea to me because it would be a lot easier than writing a thesis! heh 🙂
True…a thesis always seemed so daunting to me. I can’t imagine writing 100+ pages on a topic within international relations. It definitely could be done, but it would take a long time and a lot of focus, which I’m definitely lacking right now.
Anything is possible 😉 If my footnotes were double spaced in my law review article, it would be over 100 pages about indoor tanning! lol
By the way, I moved schools a lot when I was younger and skipped a grade in grade school so ultimately I missed out on a lot of the grammar/sentence structure stuff. I can usually figure out what “sounds” right, but I have no idea what the actual rules are… I would probably do poorly on those essays you have to write!!
I have a feeling that certain professors at UT would be no more helpful than this one at OU. There are lousy profs at every university…
You’re right, Jim. Unfortunately, I seem to have had a run of bad profs from there. Not all of them were bad, though. I LOVED my international law professor, which, coincidentally, everyone else hated because they thought he was too hard.
Perhaps it has more to do with the level of expectation for a military community than it does OU professors. It seems that the expectation isn’t very high here…
I just finished up doing my three essays for graduations (I passed yay!!) and I heard that the number one reason why people fail essays for graduation is failure to completely answer the question. I know that sounds pretty lame but I understood it when writing my essays. A lot of them ask multiple questions for one essay and making sure you coherently cover all aspects of the question is important.
Congratulations on passing! Thanks for the advice, too. I bet it can be easy to not answer all of the questions a professor asks if you’re not paying attention to the question and get sidetracked on writing on just one or two of the issues he/she raises.