Do you save & look over your old work from college?

[gnatty8]

I kept my Master's Directed Study (sort of like a thesis) because it fucken (sic) rocked.

It was on the use of VaR in commodity markets

 

[Connemara]

While I am not yet done with college, I've saved most everything so far. I generally don't keep the hard copies unless there were intriguing vignettes and comments from instructors on them. Everything else is on the HDD.

 

[centalones]

I keep some stuff. When I was in college, I would look through the stuff that I was keeping to try and trim it down to just the stuff that had a lot of information on it; eg. list of constituency tests from syntax class, inflection & auxiliary chart handout from Classical Japanese class, cheat sheet from statistics final.

Now that I'm not in college, I'm looking through and only keeping stuff that think might be useful when I'm in grad school over the run-up to the next big move.


Oh, and I'm never throwing away my thesis.

 

[globetrotter]

I saved pretty much nothing from college - frankly, I wasn't a good student and I am not really proud of anything I did at college (I also went to college after working in the world for more than 5 years). While I was at college I did two piece of work that I am very proud of - one was a feasibility study for a concrete plant in Jordan and the other was an official report given by the Israeli forign office to the Palestinian authority suggesting ways of building the economy in Gaza (commisioned by the forign office from the consulting sompany that I worked at the time, and executed by me). I kept copies of those.

my wife kept a lot of her stuff from college, she also tought as an assosiate proffesor for several years, and kept all of her class notes and slides. the slides take up a huge amount of space.

 

[kalice]

yup... Since Gr. 5

 

[slipperywhenwet]

I saved most of my major essays because there was one that I wrote in my 1st year soc. class that I didn't keep, and I've regretted it ever since. I kept most of my essays, and I look over them from time to time, but only to criticize my work.

My marks were never very high while I was in school, but I've always done well on essays, except in my required English 101 class. I did horribly in that class.

 

[Margaret]

I have all my papers from college, but may toss them soon. I used to think there was a lot of well-written stuff in there, but recently I reviewed a bunch and realized that despite the mostly fine grades bestowed on them, a lot of it was just well-written garbage. Oh, well. I was a kid, after all.

 

[stackey]

sure, it is the e-generation now, keeping some more word documents in the harddisk is no nusiance, and sometimes rereading the stupid immature works of the younger me amuses me so much

 

[itskub]

The cringe / shudder feeling is what I was curious about. I don't know anyone in the medical / law profession, and I've wondered if its the same thing as when those of us in the creative fields look back on our work; well-written crap.

Personally, I only e-save the best of the best of my work (just a few things so far), which I know I'll delete the day I graduate; it's just my nature.

 

[GreyFlannelMan]

As I'm old, the work I have saved is all hard copy. I have saved selected papers from college, particularly those from classes in which I had an actual interest (which were few and far between). What amazes me is how much my writing and analytical skills have advanced since then.

 

[eg1]

I am a notorious pack-rat.

 

[Matt]

nah all gone. Most of my fond memories of college involve friends and/or women. Interestingly those people turned into A Network, which is undoubtedly worth more to me now than my paper on realpolitik.

 

[ryoneo]

I have saved just about every paper from college. I have them boxed up and labeled with a class code and date. I also have notes from high school, but only world history and government class. The only two classes that I didn't skip or fall asleep to.

 

[thinman]

I have all my lecture notes, homework, and tests from every science and math class I took as an undergrad and in grad school bound and in a bookshelf in my office. I periodically pull something off the shelf and look for problems to torture my current students. It's sometimes (usually?) embarrassing to look at my attempts to answer the questions.

I also have all but one of my old science and math textbooks.

 

[James Gatz]

In the book Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon made a comment to the effect that looking back over your old stuff, even if it's a canceled check, makes you cringe. I never throw any of my old work away. Sometimes I'll pull something out and it'll spark a new idea, sometimes it'll just be something to read aloud to other people to humiliate myself.