Two words perfectly sum up term paper season at BUP, hell week.

The overall university experience is basically sitting around for three months and then, out of nowhere, having six quizzes, four assignments and three re-mids in the last two weeks. And the cherry on top? Five term paper submissions.

Suddenly, everyone is sleep-deprived, the class group chats are more active than ever and someone is always asking whether the deadline is tonight or tomorrow. You start measuring time in submissions rather than days. Your Google Drive becomes a graveyard of half-finished documents, your laptop has 37 tabs open and the only thing keeping you going is the delusion that once this is over, you’ll finally get some rest. Until the next semester, obviously.

What’s funny is how we somehow manage to romanticise the whole experience afterwards. We complain about the workload, swear we’ll never put ourselves through this again and then, a few weeks later, we’re signing up for another competition, joining another club or volunteering for another project. Maybe that’s university life. You’re constantly exhausted but somehow convinced that you’re missing out if you’re not doing more.

The funniest part is how much effort we sometimes put into things that don’t necessarily go as planned. For one marketing presentation, we spent three whole days perfecting our chocolate-coated protein bar, hoping the faculty would appreciate the effort we put into turning our idea into something tangible. We showed up with our little creation, ready to make an impression. The faculty didn’t even touch the bar. And to make things worse, three other teams had apparently reached the exact same conclusion about bringing their vision to life.

Three days of work, chocolate everywhere and an existential crisis over a protein bar. So much for standing out.

Then there’s the time we trusted the holy grail, Claude, to help us put together our presentation slides. Everything looked perfectly fine until the faculty pointed out how distorted one of our graphs was. We hadn’t even noticed. There we stood, collectively contemplating which excuse would sound the least ridiculous. It’s a special kind of humiliation when the tool you trusted to save you becomes the reason you have to defend yourself.

But honestly, I think these experiences say something about how we approach academic work. Sometimes, we’re so caught up in meeting deadlines and making our submissions look impressive that we forget to question what we’re actually presenting. We want the polished slides, the creative idea and the perfect report, but when do we get the time to sit with an idea long enough to understand it? There’s a difference between learning how to research and learning how to make something look like research. And during hell week, the latter can feel like a much more practical survival skill.

Then comes the group project dilemma, which deserves an entire article of its own.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, you realise that the team you’ve been working with since the first semester isn’t really working anymore. Someone is too busy with club work, someone else has a part-time job to focus on and then there’s that one person who never really cared about the work and has somehow remained the most consistent member of the group in that regard.

It’s strange because you enter university thinking that finding your people is one of the hardest parts. And then you find them, work with them for semesters and assume you’ve figured it out. Until everyone’s priorities start changing. The person who used to finish their section early is suddenly unavailable. Someone who was once your go-to teammate has commitments you can’t blame them for having. And you’re left trying to figure out whether the group still works or whether you’re just holding on because starting over sounds worse.

And it often does sound worse. Building yourself into a new team can feel like a struggle far more exhausting than completing a research paper with a dysfunctional one. With your existing team, at least you know exactly who will disappear before the deadline, who will panic at 2 AM and who will somehow pull everything together at the last minute. With a new team, you’re starting from scratch, trying to figure out people’s work ethics, personalities and whether their promise to finish their section actually means anything.

I suppose university teaches you that being friends with someone and being able to work with them are two entirely different things. You can care about someone and still not make a good team. And sometimes, learning that distinction is an academic lesson in itself, just not one you’ll find in the course outline.

What bothers me most about term paper season, though, is how little room there seems to be for doing things properly. Research takes time. Good ideas need experimenting with, bad ideas need revising and learning something new requires the occasional mistake. But when five submissions are competing with quizzes, re-mids and everything else, the goal shifts from doing your best work to getting everything submitted before the portal closes. We end up treating deadlines as the finish line when they should be the starting point of a learning process.

Of course, not every assignment is pointless, and not every deadline is unreasonable. Sometimes, the pressure forces you to organise yourself, collaborate with people you wouldn’t otherwise work with and discover that you’re capable of more than you thought. There is value in that. I just wish the learning didn’t so often get buried under the sheer volume of work.

Somewhere between the last-minute research, the group members who vanish into thin air and the presentations you’ve rehearsed a dozen times, you end up with stories you’ll probably laugh about later. At the time, though, nothing is funny. You’re just trying to get through the week without missing a deadline, embarrassing yourself in front of the faculty or losing whatever remains of your sanity.

Maybe that’s the most BUP thing about term paper season. You complain, you improvise, you submit something at an hour you probably shouldn’t be awake for and you somehow make it to the other side. You learn about research, teamwork and presentation skills, sure. But you also learn about your own limits, other people’s priorities and the uncomfortable reality that effort doesn’t always translate into recognition.