Just one little slice of my Panic Pie

I was a junior in high school the last time I actually seriously wrote an academic research paper.

The next year, I was consumed with college auditions, applications and graduation recitals. So I coasted through my senior year of AP English by writing my research paper on Debussy so that all of my research sources were in my family’s "library" at home, peppering it with esoteric classical music terminology in hopes of impressing and/or intimidating my way to a decent grade – an easy maneuver to accomplish since that particular teacher was distracted by all the girls in my class who actually bought into the rumors of his willingness to take on under-aged paramours and if not that, then his willingness to give “A”s to the best flirters. I got an “A.” (Believe me, there was no flirting with 40+ men in my under-aged social repertoire so either he was duly impressed or I can thank the flirting, under-aged girls.)

At my prestigious music conservatory, it was generally accepted that good, well-prepared, spell-checked papers would be turned in by music education majors, composition majors, a handful of double-majors and an even smaller handful of performance majors who were wise enough to see beyond the next 4 years. The rest of us performance majors would throw excellent ideas onto paper in haphazard form and print it out 10 minutes before class without spell-checking or any kind of proofing for that matter – all in the name of practice. We had to PRACTICE! How could we spare any extra time to acknowledge that there could be other skills that might prove useful for the future? Other subject matters to explore more deeply so that we could eventually mature into insightful, well-versed musicians and members of society? God bless the long-suffering professors at music conservatories everywhere who have to teach performance majors. They don’t deserve that.

I, on the other hand, fully deserve the panic I’m feeling about entering graduate school with my previous research writing experience having been from the era of actual card catalogs and golf pencils without erasers.