The art of last-minute assignments

It’s a random Wednesday night for you. You either shift between Netflix and obscure YouTube rabbit holes or doomscrolling, doing everything possible except pretending to care about your assignment that’s due the next night.

You get a text from your friend that says, “Hey, have you started? This essay is really testing my patience.” Your heart sinks, nerves suspended in time. The audacity of her not to start the assignment on the due date! Why is she not wasting time like you, accompanying you in your dedicated procrastination? You brush off the text. Last-minute pressure has never failed you (pun intended), and it won’t do so now. There’s a very good reason why you continue to procrastinate.

The next evening, you finally feel the hues of panic ushering in. You open the assignment file. A 2000-word essay. To be completed in five hours. Meticulous research. Citations with an annotated bibliography. Yikes. Has the time finally come where you learn a lesson about the importance of time management?

With a tinge of guilt, you visit your dear friend, ChatGPT. Upon seeing it concoct the most ridiculous of citations from thin air, unabashedly making up facts, and fabricating numbers as it goes, you quietly close the tab. Dread creeps in. The AC is on, but you feel a sweat trickling down your spine.

Read more

The five stages of grief in a group assignment

You’re on your own. And you’re out of time.

Soon, tabs bloom across your screen like a palette, disorderly yet unambiguous and aesthetic. Any bit which is relevant? Copy-paste. Rewrite. Copy-paste. Rewrite. You refuse to look at the clock. You cannot afford to. The adrenaline rushing through your fingertips sustains you to keep writing, or well, paraphrasing.

Over the next few hours, you throw yourself into your craft. What is food? What is a sip of water? What does a moment of rest feel like? Like an artist driven mad by his genius, you are consumed with the urge to create. After all, an artist always has a muse. For many, it’s heartbreak or grief. For you, it’s six cups of coffee, chaos and a deadline which keeps looming in.

At last, you see a shape, a pattern; the essay has a structure in that it somewhat makes sense. Abstract art and all that. It will do. Finally, a glance at the clock. 21 minutes till the deadline. Maybe you’ll make it. The citations with the wretched annotated bibliography remain. Citation generators come to your rescue, like always. As for the annotated bibliography, you write a bunch of perfunctory nothings just to get the job done.

There’s no need to review if your essay has been formatted correctly, or even to take a look at the plagiarism percentage. There’s no time, actually. God will take care of the rest.

Precisely three minutes are remaining when you realise you don’t even know the Turnitin credentials. At a speed which would put the Flash to shame, you find it and log in. The only thing making your body function at the moment is a sheer adrenaline rush.

Right at the cusp of 11:59 PM, you hit "Submit" with shaky fingers, a racing heart, and a frenzied stillness. You did it. And this is exactly why you cannot bid farewell to the beautiful functionality of procrastination.

15 minutes later, your phone alerts you to a Google Classroom notification: “New Assignment” from another course.

Here we go again.

Anica Bushra Rahmaan offers a monthly glimpse into her life through this article. Relate to her through anicarahmaan@gmail.com