Let me give you two pieces of advice: first, as a student it is extremely important to start your papers in advance. It does you no favors to sit down and try to work through the night and crank out something that you throw a "meh good enough" stamp on the night before. Second your choices as a person affect not just you, but possibly your friends. The reason I'm telling you this is because my friend neglected these two rules, and we both payed for it, with two 4 am nights.
So background here first, this story is about my friend Mal, since it is his dissertation after all. Now Mal has been on break from college for about a month and a half, and has to turn in a dissertation of between eight to ten thousand words before it ends. Mal has known about it since the beginning and had put it off. Whenever one of us would ask him about it, he'd give a noncommittal grunt and say he'd do it later. Welp later rolled around, and on Saturday, with a six day lead in we started this paper. I say "we" here because even though my name is on the paper, and I will not get any formal credit for it, this was in actuality a group project. You see, in Mal's own words he was not writing but "turning in a dumpster fire of words". So we started out journey on Saturday, and like any piece of writing getting started was hard.
Working down from the big topic of politics in video games, to a working thesis is hard. But eventually we got one that compared eastern and western MMO's and the in game political systems. Sunday we turned around and actually started writing and got an introduction and one game done. Monday, however was a mess. If you have ever seen Community, or the gif where Donal Glover walks into the room with pizza and people are going crazy that sums up Monday. I came home and I got a wall of text that Mal apparently wrote in 5 minutes. Just rows and columns of text stretching down through my Skype client, it would have been beautiful, if it wasn't riddled with almost every mistake you can think of. Grammatical, syntax, spelling, he got them all.
And so my Monday night was spent editing two thousand words on a game which I have never played in a genre which I hate while Mal audibly slips into insanity. This pattern continued for three days, Mal writes a wall of text, and I payed for it by spending hours editing it while he loses his mind, with both of us occasionally slacking off to talk about wrestling. On January 25th, with about three thousand words to go, and a day before the submission deadline we cracked. We lost our minds,we hit the wall, however you want to say it the fact is quality control fell away. from 12 midnight until 4 am crafted a disgusting four thousand word part with a conclusion that would make any English teacher weep.
When we saw the ending word count, I don't know if Mal wanted to kill me or kiss me, as he broke into a part laugh and part cry over Skype. I became more invested in his paper than anyone I have ever written for myself. So please if you have take anything away, just know that 4 am all night dissertations with friends are not fun and you should never do them.
