What to do With Your Old Course Syllabi

How does the saying go? Time flies when you're having fun, right? Well, I think time flies either way because one of my biggest problems is procrastination. I've been known to say, "Oh, I have weeks until that paper is due" and then I'm scrambling to finish researching, writing and editing that same paper by the deadline. I was much worse about this as an undergraduate though.

One nice thing about being a graduate student is that I've already completed so much research (and printed most of it out, too) that I can just reach over to my filing cabinet rather than running to the library. Yes, I'm a nerd who keeps all of my old research organized in a filing cabinet, but it comes in handy! My suggestion is that others pick up this dorky habit as well. In addition, students should always keep syllabi, handouts, notes and essays from previous courses. These will definitely come in handy. I don't mean that you should re-use a paper or anything! That'd be plagiarism. But, I do think that students can and should use information from old classes as a reference or starting point for current projects. The Works Cited page of my old papers really helps point me in the right direction to find pertinent research. Of course, looking at a published article's bibliography is even more helpful. Plus, if you plan to attend graduate school, you may be teaching some of those lessons in the future!

If not as a reference or starting point, why else should people keep their old class notes and whatnot? Well, what if you want or have to transfer to a new college? The syllabi from the classes you took are extremely important to this process. The new college will peruse the syllabus for each class and decide whether the topics discussed in that course matches the necessary curriculum. If so, the class is accepted as transfer credit. Without the syllabi though, the new college won't know if any of the classes match up.