Editorial – the eleventh hour
In school, most of us were ‘good students’, who spent the last week before the exams revising our portions for the third or fourth time. When we come to IITB, we learnt to do things at the last minute. Most people feel vaguely guilty about this; when the topic comes up in conversation, they make sweeping statements about how much better and more admirable they were before they came to IIT, and how bad it is to complete everything just in time.
But is it really a bad thing?
The last minute – the period of time when you know that you absolutely cannot delay any longer – is extraordinarily productive. Everyone who has studied a semester’s worth of portions in the hour before the endsem will know that their power to grasp never – seen before concepts increases exponentially in that time period.
Even in event management, the law of the eleventh hour works. Most events that happen in IITB are hastily put together at the last minute, and the organizers exchange glances during the event in disbelief that it is actually happening. We have a belief that everything will happen – the ho jaayega mantra – and, miraculously, most things do happen.
The night out, the IITian’s solution to everything, is another example. Anyone who has ever stayed awake all night with a group of people, working against a two – week old deadline, will testify that almost any task can be completed in a productive night out. It’s also fun (at least till 5 AM).
I know a certain person who always turns up half an hour late for any exam. His rationale – he is under twice the amount of pressure in that half hour; the ‘normal’ last minute pressure is added to the pressure of being late for the exam. He says the strategy usually works for him, but we advise caution. After all, all the last minute preparation in the world will be useless if you don’t have time to write your answers down!
Obviously, it is not true that last minute work is always a good thing. Academically, it is almost always true that those who have spent a large part of the semester studying perform better than those who have desperately crammed a list of tutorial problems into their already crowded minds on the day before the exam. They also retain more – no last-minute specialist ever remembers anything the day after the exam. The thing is, not too many of us plan our last – minute time usage. Those who have become really good at it are known by various combinations of the words god, stud and cracku.
Last – minute work also does not normally allow for a large – scale project (to some extent, the PAF is an exception). For example, most tech enthusiasts at IITB are not able to do as well as their counterparts in other colleges simply because the students from the other college have put in more hours of honest effort.
Thus, the main argument against last minute work is loss of quality. The focus in such work is always to finish one’s task at any cost, and very few people ever have the time to check whether the work is done well.
Most of us would have realized that, when we actually put in a sustained effort to do something in IITB, we do experience great success. It would seem logical that we stop last – minute work altogether, but I think that last – minute work definitely has its place. After all, what else can allow you to write a full lab journal, a seminar report and study for two quizzes, all in three hours?
- Vaibhav Devanathan