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"Among the assignments was a 19-page paper, longer than anything he’d ever written."

off-topic, but wow: no college graduate should break out in a cold sweat over a 19-page paper.

I had the same reaction. It might not be reasonable to ask for something like that overnight, but with a month or more of notice that seems like it should be No Big Deal. That's less than a page a day, on average, so the actual writing is almost trivial. A page's worth of thought and research doesn't seem like an unreasonable daily burden except maybe for something like a dense mathematical proof.

Seriously. I was expected to churn out 2-3 of those a semster in high school!

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