April 29, 2010
Posted by Sam Jackson
Yale Final Papers and Exams, Spring 2010
The following photo is a stack of a selection of the sources I am using for my final paper in Prof. Keith Darden's Nationalism + National Identity class (EP&E 412 / INTS 328 / PLSC 158 / PLSC 655 ). There is more where this came from, not to mention JSTOR articles and the like. O_o
Note that last PLSC 655, indicating that it is cross-listed for the graduate department -- usually that just means it is open to grads, and maybe there is one or two in the class... but this class is maybe 70% PhD students, 10% Masters, and the last sliver, a few undergrads... (!). So I am working very hard on the paper to be up to the standard, so to speak. Scary! There were more undergrads at first but many fell away...
Darden is a brilliant professor / scholar with a good sense of humor, and the class is great fun, but the paper is both fairly long [20-25 pages] and, by necessity, hugely research-intensive. It's almost like a one-semester senior essay, except, I'm not a senior and not doing it for credit as such. (Remember, I'm trying to do a year-long). Matters are complicated by particular difficulties in the China case, and of course a perpetual scarcity of data...
My paper is about nationalism / the development of national identity in China seen through the lens of the Manchurian Incident, addressing Manchuria under Japanese occupation 1931-1936 and also focusing on student protest and uprisings elsewhere. The case for exploring variables which affect rates of resistance in Manchukuo (the Japanese-created puppet state) is made difficult by sparse data, so I am more exploring the phenomena of why so much more widespread protest seems to be found elsewhere. More on the paper later; maybe I'll post it in full if I'm happy with it. (Do people want to read my papers? I am never sure, and always worried they may come back to haunt me, so I have tended not to share my academic work here.)
I have three other finals next week, and another paper too. (This and another paper due Monday; Chinese finals Weds; Tech World + Blacks & the Law on Thursday). Bummer. But, I'll survive.
Readers: do you have finals? Hanging in there? Kudos to the use of my blog to procrastinate, if you are doing so.
I'm currently a rising senior at Yale University and I've been blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends since I began my college application process in 2005. I now also write about my experience here at Yale.
2 Comments
April 30, 2010
My finals and AP exams are next week...trying not to think about them. My last day of high school was yesterday, and today was prom!
Delighted to know that these research papers are waiting for me in college :\
And I'd love to read your paper!
May 7, 2010
I never took APs senior year; wish I had. I was told they were no credit (true, basically) but they would have been handy for placement for some things. I guess I didn't really need to spend the money, in the end. Oh well.
Essay on its way if you really want...
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