New Semester, Old Problems

Officially I have survived the first week of school. A class every night and homework in between classes and work. It was a hard week and you won't believe the homework I have, but that's not what I want to write about.

So my Tuesday night is a marriage class and the professor assigned us to read his original manuscript that he barely finished in time for the semester. That's not all that unusual because lots of my history professors write history books for the courses they teach and then assign them to us for free so I save money by not having to purchase the textbook.Well this class started out with all of us introducing ourselves, and I mentioned I was an editor and working on my minor in editing. The professor asked to see me after class.

He had a proposition for me! If I agreed to edit his book (the one every student had to read anyway), he would first excuse me from having to write the midterm paper, and in addition he would look into maybe paying me out of some department funds. This, too, is not out of the ordinary because my last editing gig at BYU was a random professor using department funds. Pretty mainstream stuff, actually. So I agreed, copied his manuscript onto my lappy, and went home.

Jump to Wednesday night. It had been an entire 22 hours since my marriage class with the writer-professor. I had gotten up at 6, taken Josh to Trax, gone to work, done some homework for a couple of other classes, driven down to BYU, attended a 3-hour class, purchased a textbook, driven back up to Murray, filled the tank with gas, and picked up Josh at work. As soon as I got home for the first time that day, after 8 p.m., I opened my email and wouldn't you know it, the professor had emailed me that day. His email said something to this effect: "Camilla, I need you to send me the completed introduction and first two chapters so I can upload them to Blackboard tonight. Let me know what you've got. Thanks, BB"

Awesome. I had managed to work on his draft a little bit during the day, but only like 10 pages, not the 30 needed to fulfill his requirement. And he had given me no deadline or any inclination that he was in a desperate rush to receive the manuscript back, so I was completely baffled and totally stressed out. I was on a time-crunch already from my schoolwork and I did not have time that night to edit after I read my science chapters, completed my science homework, and kicked Josh off my online statistics textbook.

So I got up at 4 this morning, edited his work, and emailed it before I went to work. At least I know now the kind of time-frame he wants me to work in, but I have to finish his next 160 pages really, really soon on top of reading 400 pages for my various other classes and completing a handful of assignments and one ten-page research paper, all before I go out of town on Saturday. Now I remember why I burned out the last semester I took at BYU.

The moral of the story is:
Kids: Stay in school, but don't attend school while accepting freelance work on top of your full-time job. That's just dumb.