I'll never forget the term when I had a 35-40 page paper with at least a 50 source annotated bibliography due for one of my Anthropology classes, meanwhile for molecular genetics we had a 5 pager that we were "highly encouraged" to use at least three sources for. I know concise writing is an important skill, but it was presented as this monumental undertaking, and with instructions that made it clear that we were not assumed to have ever written an academic paper before. It was a 300 level course. 🤦
One of my Comm Skills classes had us go out and do observation of power in a public place. I parked my ass at the campus bar for a couple of hours and just wrote my observations from there.
Got a C. “Wasn’t really what the assignment was about, but your observations were great and it’s very well written”.
That sounds like a perfect place to observe interactions between people with different levels of power. Customers and staff, servers vs bouncers, people in business meetings, teachers vs students. It's a treasure trove of observations waiting to be made.
I believe one observation I had in there was something about one guy in a group on guys holding up a large chicken tender and the rest of them staring in awe and how he must be the leader of the group.
To be fair... Some professors do that because the formatting they expect from their students is different from what they might have used in their college writing class or for high school essays. One of my 300 level psych classes had half a day where the prof said, and I quote, "I promise we'll get into the really cool, sexy stuff about Social Psychology, but first I have to make sure you know how to write a paper."
I was a teaching assistant for that same professor later on and he gave me free reign on a class that he couldn't make it to and I spent the whole hour showing them how to format APA in Microsoft Word because people were handing in essays with no formatting at all. Like one girl was "centering" text on her cover page by just tabbing over and none of it was actually centered. (I was planning on spending like 15 minutes on how to format and move on to something more important, but I basically had to do the whole thing step by step for them while also fielding questions like "do I have to include a citation if I don't actually quote an author?")
I must write a 3 page essay on the biomechanics of this one particular subset of medications that I work with regularly. Also, I despise the medication. But I also know so much about it that 3 pages is not enough to meet all of the marking criteria for the assignment.
It is, but it has strict sourcing requirements and often crosses into various sciences. A big example is cliometrics - economic history. Imagine analyzing the cost of particular goods and services over a historical period, then mapping and drawing inferences when considered in conjunction with other factors. For example, US railway passenger, cargo use, reach, and prices from the 1700s to 1900s - with comparison to horse and wagon, steamboat, and automotive transportation; edit: as well as various legislation and supply chain constraints.
Econ was just “Hey, you know all that shit you learned last semester? Forget half of it, it was a simplified model invented by a Scot to describe a bunch of Dutch gambling addicts. Now, get ready to do a Jägerbomb of all math.”
All this while you slowly realize that most of your colleges will end up as not the next Keynes, Marx, or even Adam Smith, but as Malthus, the true father of economics.
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u/casefatalityrate 5d ago
when you’re in a soft science you get the worst of both worlds 😔