Working vacation

My sister's graduate school applications are due on Tuesday, which means that she had to mail them on Friday. But she has been so overwhelmed with her other work that she didn't get a chance to write essays or fill out the applications before break. So my family spent Thanksgiving evening working on her grad school applications.

My parents filled in applications, while I worked on the essays. My sister wrote drafts and I re-wrote them. For her field, every school requires a different essay, so it took hours.

Working on her essays brought back awful memories of my grad school applications from four years ago. I didn't ask my family to help, but I spent my winter break holed up working on them. The whole process was so stressful and horrible.

My parents were annoyed with my sister for waiting until the last minute, but I totally get it -- every time you sit down to work on applications, it's like "Oh God, anything but this..."

Now I'm back and I have an enormous stack of projects to grade, then exams. It's going to be a rough week.