I saw my first ever graduate seminar syllabus today. My first thought was "holy crap, that is a lot of reading," followed by "thankfully, reading is easy," followed by an unnerving feeling when I reached the end of the syllabus that discussed requirements for the final paper. I have no problem reading or writing papers or coming up with ideas, but it seems like I'll have a heck of a time figuring out proper formatting and things like that. I'm not sure what style my department prefers (my guess is Chicago). I'm also worried about endnotes (which were specifically mentioned in the paper requirements and I'm told this isn't uncommon for the dept.). This might sound stupid, but What on earth is an endnote? I mean, I know what endnotes are, technically -- at the end of papers, discussing little details that would be good for your readers to know, sources, and things of that nature, but I've never actually written an endnote myself so I have no idea how they're generally structured or why I personally would need them. I try not to put superfluous information in my papers and although reading endnotes has been useful when reading others' scholarly works, I never actually wrote them for my undergrad papers. I did use footnotes that basically just had bibliographic citation information, but my guess is that this isn't the same thing as a "real" endnote. I've literally spent the last hour on Google trying to discern how endnotes differ from footnotes (is it just that one is in the footer and one is at the end of text?), which makes me feel really, reallystupid. I'm not worried about the amount of reading or even the fact that final papers are usually research papers. All of this is second nature. I don't know why, though, I am so worried about formatting. Perhaps it's because my undergrad art history department didn't really care what formatting you used as long as you were consistent. Perhaps it's because once, I was 1 point away from a perfect score on a health sciences paper just because my margins weren't exactly 1.25" despite how much I tried to fix them and restructure my footnotes (thanks, Word). Or maybe it's because I'm worried that I'll fail (i.e., "get anything less than an A[-]") on my papers and lose all my funding by the second semester because I can't format my writing properly. Sigh.
I'm also concerned about what exactly a graduate level seminar sounds like, with regards to student-to-student discussion. I've always thought that I could just be myself in discussions and not have to strive to sound/act/speak certain ways. I assume that this is the same for graduate study, but I also assume that I'll have one professor and ten students judging the merit of what I'm saying (to decide about future funding. Again. Even though fellow students have nothing to do with funding, I don't think.) This sounds silly as a write it, and I know it is. The department and I will get along famously, I'm sure. But I just have to let out all these unhealthy thoughts in a safe place....
I suppose I won't really know any of this until I actually get to the first day of classes.
Thanks for listening to my stream-of-consciousness, anxiety-wracked post about endnotes (sorry).