For Finals week, I thought I was getting off pretty easy since I only had 1 exam to take and some papers. But those papers turned into 5 essays and 4 I had to do for 1 class by today! So needless to say I was up alllll night long writing and writing some more. I know I never should have waited to the last minute like this, but I was dealing with GRE stuff last week and then focused on studying for my difficult Comm Law class final. I needed to write the 4 papers for my Comm 500 (Quantitative Journalism) class since I made a 76 on the last exam and even though I scored a 92 on the 1st test and got 16 points in participation & attendance, I would still need 91 points in assignments to reach the 275 to make an A. So that meant writing a quantitative research report worth 50 pts, 2 press releases for 20 pts a piece, and 1 empirical journal review for 5 points.

I tried working on the research paper first since it was worth the most points but I didn't even have a topic. The assignment was to take statistics from public data and write a brief journalistsic story on it in 2000 words or more. I decided to use charts from the U.S. Census Bureau, which provided household figures for 2007 and just write on how there are drastically more females heading homes with children under 18 opposed to males.

In the meantime, I further prepared for my Comm Law final by studying with my friends from class in the much crowded 24-hour library, and we ended up studying till 1am when I still had 4 papers to write by 11:30am! So the clock was definitely ticking and the pressure was on. I had to read the empircal article and then write a review on it in 2 hours, next I moved on to writing the 2 press releases. I interviewed the researchers for the 2 studies so I had to transcribe what they said from my tape recorder, read their results from their studies and write those fairly quickly. The hour was about 7am, the sun was coming up, and I had to make sure I was writing a good 800 words per press release and that it was proofread and perfect enough to get the full 40 points.

I finally kicked off wiriting the big research paper around 9am and had no idea how I was going to be able to get 2000 words in 2 hours about some stats! But I was just typing away, rephrasing old statements and totally breaking down the data from comparing the numbers of single mothers in Ohio to the rest of Midwest and all over the U.S. But I was working well under the pressure and finished it up by 11am, which gave me enough time to get ready to go and eat some cereal.

I speed walk my way to my Final exam, and take it with bloodshot red eyes and absolutely no energy. Amazingly, the test didn't seem bad at all since normally we have to cite various court cases and laws, but he just asked simple and straighforward questions. I'm glad I finished that exam by 1pm so I was able to turn in all 4 of my papers to my other professor by 1:30.

Guess being a journalist and having that daily pressure of being able to produce good stoires in a short amount of time just stuck with me, and I still can't believe I was able to pull off 4 papers in about 9 hours. Thank you God!!! Glad I got those out of the way, so I can go to sleep and write my last paper for my Social Work class tomorrow!