I never knew how it felt to get a “0″ as a grade, and there it was! My first ever big fat zero on my first paper for my master’s degree. Pheww… although after the professor had told us the whole class did horrible on this paper, I sort of saw this coming, but it still struck me when it actually happened.

Thank goodness that I’ve experienced this kind of transition when I first entered college from high school, so there wasn’t any mental breakdown (ha!). In fact, after I thought about it, this professor actually only meant good for us. I have to admit that when I first got the assignment topic, my mind was blank, and that face that I have been out of school for over 8 years, I am very much behind on all the school research techniques and how the new school system works, I don’t even know how to use the online library! So I ended up using the all-time-good-friend of mine — Google.com. It wasn’t that bad in the beginning surprisingly, I was actually able to find this new Google tool called “Google Books”, and they have sections of the book published on the web where I can read some of the content. I really thought I got the hang of it, until well into writing of the paper, I start to get lost again…

So eventually my paper was just a paper that consists of paragraphs grabbed and rephrased from the books that I’ve found that “might” be relevant to the topic, without any of my own analysis… Which…is a well-deserved zero.

Our professor is nice enough to give all of us a chance to rewrite our papers and resubmit them to override the first grade. Basically it is a yellow light to tell us it’s time to get serious and think about what we are here for, and how graduate students are different from the undergraduate students. We are here to outdo our abilities and make no mistakes. It IS another stage in life, not just another class.

Something to think about, all the graduate students out there!