Stayed up until 3 AM rewriting a 4 page history paper because the professor said my thesis was "too broad" and honestly she was right.

I spent a week throwing in random facts about 19th century trade routes when all she wanted was one specific port city's impact, has anyone else had that moment where you realize you were trying to cover too much ground instead of digging deep?

2 comments

2 Comments

wade5588d ago

Man, I remember spending two weeks on a paper about "the industrial revolution" when my professor just wanted me to focus on one factory in Manchester. I had this whole section on global cotton supply chains and she crossed it out with "this belongs in a textbook, not here." It hurt but she was right, I was just padding it out because I didn't have enough solid info on the actual factory.

nancys908d ago

Have you ever heard of the Great Stink of 1858? I read somewhere that the Thames got so bad from factory waste and raw sewage that Parliament literally had to hang curtains soaked in chlorine just to keep the smell out of their meetings. That's what happens when you try to focus on the whole industrial revolution at once instead of just one stinky factory in Manchester. Your professor was basically trying to save you from writing about a whole country's worth of mess when you only needed to understand one little piece of it. Makes you wonder what that one factory was dumping into the river.