The Ultimate Writing Boot Camp
By Yale Blogger 2015 in LLM GUIDE Student Blog: Yale LLM 2015-2016 on Feb 26, 2016
Future people of Yale Law School: Prepare for the moment when, a couple weeks into the second semester, everyone will freak out. With fellowship-, JSD-proposal-, and other deadlines approaching, you and your classmates will start to resemble the poor JD-population in their perpetual driven-ness. In order to escape this unhealthy dynamic and to not let the Yale penguins steal your last drops of sanity, you should make your class representative (which you will have to call “El Presidente”) call into being an Ultimate Writing Boot Camp.
Ultimate Writing Boot Camp aims at breaking the ever-tightening chains of procrastination (it is common knowledge that there is a strong positive correlation between workload and affinity for procrastination) by locking most of the international students into a seminar room and not letting them out before at least some work has been achieved.
This is what El Presidente will do to you:
Be careful: Don’t let yourselves be tricked by the tons of cake, cookies and coffee, supposed to be waiting for you: They only serve as a bait in order to lure you into a trap of diabolic evilness, where relentless drill instructors will take away both, coffee and food, and devour them in front of your hungry eyes.
(This Tantalean torture is brought to you by one of Yale’s ORIGINALSTS - in both, the conventional and the Yalie, senses – in an effort to make you grasp the meaning of “cruel and unusual punishment”.)
So much for the theory behind Ultimate Writing Boot Camp. How did it look in practice?
The following is an excerpt from the classe’s WhatsApp thread during Ultimate Writing Boot Camp:
A: Come people, we can’t eat all this cake!
B: Or can we???
A: I was just typing that.
C: Hahaha…I think you guys will manage.
A: OK, we don’t need help with the cake. Come for the love and wonderful company.
Meanwhile in a personal thread...
E: You look very enthusiastic. Shouldn’t be on Whatsapp.
A second later...
G: I’m workiiiing!!
Voilà a performative contradiction…
E: I understand: "This statement is false..." Just saying that you look very enthusiastic about it.
G: How do you mean?
E: You look bored out of your mind.
Meanwhile in the common thread…
D: You still boot camping?
One second later...
A: Yes.
Another second later...
E: Obviously we’re not. All doing WhatsApp.
Another ten seconds...
Graduate Tutor: People doing the boot camp shouldn’t check their phones for messages.
F: Gosh. Don’t judge us. We’re very productive.
G: http://media.giphy.com/media/xT0BKvIDgNYugS3m3C/giphy.gif
B: I wish! Haha.
At this point I chose to do something worthwhile. Guess where I’m writing this blog post…
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