Hello everyone. After this nice long summer break we’re now back in the full campus grind, finalizing course schedules, mapping out midterm dates and papers, and counting the weeks until Fall Break and/or Thanksgiving. I’ve been thinking deeply about how to best use this space over the course of this year to help you all reach higher in college, and in life. Over the past week or so I’ve had a number of important conversations with students that I support, and I realized that these teachable moments have shed essential light on some vital campus concerns. I also realized that sometimes we overthink things, like waaaaaaay more than required and in the process, we lose sight of the fundamentals. We get in our heads, lose time, then start skipping steps to the point that we don’t even realize we’re skipping them anymore. So for this year, I’m focusing on slowing things down a bit and helping us take a closer look at the basics.

First up, what’s a deadline? As the name implies, it’s a line you can’t cross, otherwise, you will lose your metaphorical life. Legend has it that it comes from Civil War prisons and involved literal lives, but it’s more common use came later in journalism. Stories had to be submitted by a certain hour in order to get printed in the paper. Miss that time, miss getting published. The exception would be if you had something earth-shattering to share past the deadline, hence the phrase “stop the presses!” They would literally shut down printing and do the entire newspaper over to include your late-breaking news. Such costly publishing decisions were not made often. Certainly not when you missed a basic story deadline because you were out drinking with your friends and lost track of time.

What’s a due date? It’s when something is expected. With babies, the due date is a best guess. If the baby doesn’t feel like coming out on the due date then the baby ain’t coming out. With your schoolwork, there’s much less room for forgiveness. So, essentially, the academic due date is a nicer way of saying deadline. If you can’t deliver the goods by this date then you have left yourself open to a wide range of penalties, including a nice, round zero. Some professors will let you know how it’s going down right in the syllabus (e.g., “late papers will be deducted 10 points daily,” “late work will NOT be accepted,” or “No. The answer is no.”). You might try to explain yourself because maybe you actually have a good reason for being late. But unless you have a hospital note or there was a natural disaster, your grade is likely on the line.

Why is this so important to understand? Because no matter if you call it a deadline or a due date, many of you – not all of you, but the vast majority of you – have fallen into the trap of thinking that this is THE DAY / TIME to turn work in. It’s not. It’s the LAST day to turn work in. That word “last” makes all the difference. If it’s due by Thursday and you turn it in on Tuesday, that’s wonderful. Monday is even better. Submitting it on the Friday after the due date/deadline is a problem. Even submitting something at 4:59 pm for a 5 pm deadline is playing with your life. Why would you do this? If this is a fellowship or internship application essay, for example, and I’m in charge of reading through the entries, I might look at the time stamp and wonder if you’re really serious about the opportunity. Or, for an academic assignment, imagine cutting it this close and then the online course system crashes (which literally just happened to three of my students last night, leaving them to send me frantic e-mails explaining the situation. Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out why they planned to still be working on that paper anywhere near midnight.)

In your mind, you are thinking that you should use up every possible millisecond of task time to do the work. But in the eyes of faculty and other reviewers, we are wondering why you procrastinate until the last possible moment and upload your work at the very end of the submission window. Because we know that the only reason you are trying to squeeze out every second between 11:59 pm and 12:00 am on a midnight submission is because you didn’t start the work soon enough. How do we know this? Two reasons. We’ve read your work (and there is MUCH room for improvement; I will be covering this in a future entry). And some of us didn’t start OUR work early enough, and thus we fully get your struggle. (Some of us still don’t begin our work as early as we should, but this isn’t about us, it’s about you).

So, bottom line, remember this life-saving equation – Deadlines and due dates are “due by” and “due by” does not equal “due on.” Don’t let deadlines be the death of you and your GPA. Submit your work at least a day before the listed date.