It’s hard to believe that only as long ago as 2010, when I started my Bachelor of Arts at Deakin, that essay submission was still in hard copy form!
I think every student in the Arts faculty knew that the submissions box wasn’t emptied until around 9am the morning after the due date, although there was some debate around this. By the end of our first semester, all in my course came to consensus that 8am was probably the safest bet to get an essay turned in on-time.
The result of this nuanced knowledge left us believing we had found a glorious loophole in the system and feverishly culminated in numerous last-minute all-nighters to get the essays written.
I can’t help but wonder how many caught sight of wearied-eyed student who had caught an hour or two’s sleep before the mad dash into uni to slipping the ink-jet printed pages through the slot.
Running through the buildings, down the stairs on the multileveled Waurn Ponds Campus buildings seemed logical at the time but as I reflect on it now, I laugh at the notion that those 30 seconds or so to get the assignment in before the admin officers arrived seemed so valuable.
The writing of so many of our assignments may not have commenced until the evening of their due date but the delight of a hard copy returned with a physically stamped submission date on the cover made the act of running the gauntlet worth it.