October 17, 2017
Alan Smithee
If you’re ever in the unfortunate situation of being assigned a group project, you need to know how to handle it.
More likely than not, your group will be woefully underprepared. One of them walked in 15 minutes late with a half-empty Starbucks. Another group member yawned while the professor was assigning the project.
It may as well be the apocalypse.
It’s an important project. You need to critically analyze every point made in the text book in a novel-length treatise. This is it: if you don’t take on the two straight weeks of work by yourself, you are going to fail this course. Imagine what your parents would say if they found out.
The pages upon pages of research fall onto your shoulders to complete, and it is vital that you complete them.
Cancel all of your plans for the next few weeks. Throw the TV out the window because you need that precious table space for the project that will make or break your college career.
If, by the half-way point, your friends don’t think you’ve become a conspiracy theorist with the many pages of research you’ve done hung haphazardly on the walls, you’re not doing enough.
Slam 15 Five-Hour Energies to get 75 hours of the most productivity you’ve put out in your entire life.
Once you’ve broken three keyboards from over-use, you can take a one-minute break.
You become one with your assignment; you’re in some sort of academic Nirvana. The rest of the world falls away, and it’s just you and this glowing computer screen upon which your master work is nascent.
You see the clock turn over to midnight as the last page prints off the library printer. Two weeks, 80 bottles of Five-Hour Energy, $60 in paper. The walls back in your bedroom have a new wallpaper comprised of academic articles and your increasingly manic notes.
But it was all worth it, because you didn’t let the other group members even get close to ruining it.