What's the longest undergraduate paper you ever wrote?

[Tobin S.]

I recently wrote one that was 11 pages and 3037 words, not including the reference pages. There was a lot of citing going on in that one, though. However, that means there was a lot of research involved. I wrote one earlier this semester that was 2029 words without any citing. I just wrote one tonight that was 1575 words without any citing.

I've written stories that are longer than any of those, but that isn't as much like work. Well, maybe that's not quite right. It's just not dreadful. I used to not be very good at writing scholarly papers, but now I usually get 'A's on them. But I'm getting to the point where I'll slap any kind of shit together to get the work done. It hasn't really affected my grades yet, which leads me to believe that the other kinds of shit people are slapping together and calling scholarly papers smell worse.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Oh boy my dear Tobin, it's been so many years...no, decades, since I wrote any undergraduate paper.

I don't begin to remember how long the longest one was. My memory tells me they weren't very long, though.

Stories are a lot more fun!

[Tobin S.]

2. That they are, Peggy!

[NightWatcher]

3. To get my degree I had to do a 26 page paper on physical security of federal facilities

It didn't have to be 25 pages but it had to be a 15-30 minute presentation before the professors in my department. It was my undergrad capstone course. I interned with the USMS and tried to get it published in the DOJ monthly interagency journal. It got bumped because they didn't publish the week of 9/11. Damned Al Qaeda kept me from getting published.

[Tobin S.]

4. The 3000 word paper I mentioned above was for my capstone business course

I'm taking it this semester. For the final project for the course we have to write a 12-20 page paper, not including title or reference pages, and create an 18 slide PowerPoint presentation to accompany the paper. What makes it worse is that it has to be done as a group. I have seven people in my group and I did 80% of the work on the first project. I'd rather just do the entire thing myself because the little contribution I got from my group mates totally sucked and probably detracted from the project.

[femmocrat]

5. Can't remember! Not very long, though.

I was an art major, so I spent all of my time on projects instead of papers.

My master's paper was about 150 pp. long though.

You are fortunate that writing is not a huge hurdle for you. It was torture for me.

[LWolf]

6. 27 pages.

Didn't do a word count.

[aikoaiko]

7. 25 - 30 pages double-spaced was typical for a term paper.

[malthaussen]

8. Long time ago.

Something in the neighborhood of 26 pages double-spaced (this was back in the typewriter days), including scholarly apparatus. But I do tend to go on.

-- Mal

[CTyankee]

9. My brilliant Econ paper: The Meaning of Value: The uncertainty of the human prospec

Dazzling, I tell you...

[Avalux]

10. I can't remember undergraduate...but I just wrote a 96 page report at work.

I write documents related to clinical studies; this one was a report with a lot of stats and explaining why and how things were done.

I get paid to do this, and I enjoy it. I guess my question to you is - do you enjoy the writing process when you do a paper?

[Tobin S.]

18. I do not enjoy writing scholarly papers.

I do enjoy writing short stories. Short stories are more imaginative and don't require as rigid a structure.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

11. I don't remember, but they seemed interminable at the time

because they were written on a manual typewriter (if any of you young whippersnappers remember those), and also using carbon paper, so if you made a mistake you had to erase the original plus the copy. It was incredibly tedious. I think the longest was probably 20-25 pages but it seemed like I was trying to write the Encyclopedia Britannica. Eventually I became much more proficient at spewing forth a lot of stuff (crap?) in a short time, and now can easily churn out a 20-page document over a weekend, no problem. But it sure helps to have a computer.

[fizzgig]

12. i'm sure i cranked out some epic ones

i was a journalism major and took a lot of other very writing-heavy classes.

[Dirty Socialist]

13. 34 Page Lab Report

In a Chemistry Lab. One credit hour. I received an A for the report.

[Chan790]

14. My undergraduate thesis was minimum length of 50 pages.

I don't know how long the paper I turned in was, I was delirious and hadn't slept in 112 hours while writing it during senior week, after the semester ended and before graduation. I have no real memories of the week between being drunk and brain-damage from the lack of sleep.

I also don't have the paper, but the department chair told me years later that it was abysmal, that I got a pity pass on it so that I wouldn't have to enroll in one course in the Fall semester just so I could write another one in order to graduate.

[a la izquierda]

15. 40

But I was a history major.
I'm now a history prof. My students' theses next semester will be 50 pages.

[Jenoch]

16. A few years ago I had to do something much

more difficult than writing a long term paper. I had to take a 60 page report on controlling emissions at a factory (written by an engineer) and simplify it so the data and control measures could be understood by laymen. Since, I'm not an environmental engineer, I had to work with the author to find the most significant details and boil it down to about ten pages.

(I had a boss who used to apologize for writing such long letters because he did not have the time to write a short one.)

[hunter]

17. My senior thesis was supposed to be thirty pages or more.

I had created something that turned out to be a a good sized book once I'd graduated and obsessively put it all together just the way I wanted it.

Unlike you, Tobin, I was the undergraduate student from hell. I got kicked out of school twice and even though I had my act mostly together for the third try I burned through several senior thesis advisors, one of whom recently passed away and hadn't deserved any of my crazy shit.

The much shorter thesis I turned in still had a strong odor of "Fuck You!" about it, and much worse I'd stumbled into my oral presentation after a tremendous alcohol fueled wrap party held by the University's Daily Newspaper, which I wrote for. But the department chair of my major was so happy to be rid of me he signed off so I could graduate even though I'd put some of my transparencies on the overhead projector upside down and not noticed because the light hurt my eyes. (Other people who were there told me later.)

The chair of the English Department (English was my minor, in essence) was not so forgiving. She'd noticed I'd taken only one lower division English class, a class which was not a requirement or a prerequisite for anything, and that I hadn't properly completed high school. Furthermore, she wondered how I'd managed to get into and pass all those upper division English courses without the proper prerequisites. I'd say now it was because the primitive computer software they had in those ancient times didn't cross-check everything.

I made multiple appointments with her to sign off on my graduation papers, but she never showed up, and then she went away to teach in Europe for a year. So I had to go to a dean, the same guy who had "asked" me to take time off from college the first time for fighting with one of his teaching assistants. He signed off on the English requirement so I could graduate and told me I should go on to graduate school, "BUT NOT HERE!"

(If anyone wants to criticize my writing in this post, I'm trying to channel my reckless youth...)

[mythology]

19. 40 something pages

It was basically an undergrad, grad school-esque class. Because really with a degree in history, you should probably be going on to grad school and this was a class designed to help bridge that gap so you knew better what grad school would look like.

His wife, who was a much harder grader, expected a 25ish page paper in her senior level class. I actually had to put more work into that paper than the 40 something page paper. But I liked her so much, I took two of her classes.

[benld74]

20. I bought one back in the 80's,,,,,,,,,