Research Paper on Procrastination in College Student

A lot of people struggle with procrastionation, especially in school. Procrastination can cause us to be stressed, lead us to poor decision making and block us from completing our goals. Tim Urban tells us about how what procrastination is like for him and how he struggles with it. Tim urban talks to his audience about procrastination to help listeners to understand and overcome procrastination. In inside the mind of a master procrastinator, Tim Urban makes effective use of rhetorical strategies ethos, pathos, and logos to show us what it is like to procrastinate and how we can overcome it.

College students undergo a lot of challenges and one of the main challenges they struggle with is procrastination. Tim Urban uses pathos to explain to his audience his story on how he has a procrastion issue. Tim urban mentions that he had a 90-page thesis due at the end of the year. Since Tim had the whole year to complete it, he did not pay the thesis paper much attention till it was almost due. Tim urban mentioned that “two months turned into one month, which turned into two weeks. And one day I woke up with three days until the deadline, still not having written a word, and so I did the only thing I could: I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours”(Timestamp 1:23)  Tim treated his senior thesis like it was a staircase. In the first few months Tim started off by just looking over his assignment, then the middle months went by where he didn’t get many words down, and finally, the paper was due in three days and he needed to cram a 90-page thesis in three days. Tim urban soon realized that that was not a superb idea at all, based on his grade. Alonge with Tim telling us his story on procrastination, Tim goes on to explain how procrastionation works and why people procrastinate.

The mind of a procrastinator is different from the brains of other people. Tim Urban uses ethos to prove that people who procrastinate have a different mindset than other people. Tim states “I found an MRI lab that actually let me scan both my brain and the brain of a proven non-procrastinator, so I could compare them”.(Timestamp 2:40)  In this brain scan, both of the brains have rational decision-makers in them, but only the procrastinator’s brain had a Gratification Monkey. A Gratifications Monkey is basically your brain telling you “no” when you need to get something important done. Tim Urban explains how the Gratification Monkey works and why this Gratification monkey affects people from getting things done. In addition to Tim Urban using ethos to prove people who procrastinate have different minds than people who do not procrastinate, Tim Urban uses logos to convince his audience that procrastination is an actual problem by using feedback he got from his blog.

Many people can relate to the topic of procrastination. Tim Urban uses logos by talking about the emails he got from people and turning that into statistics.  After Tim wrote his blog about the Gratification Monkey and the Rational Decision-Maker, He got tons of emails from people saying they struggle with procrastionation as well which has affected their lives. Tim urban proclaims “It's that long-term procrastination has made them feel like a spectator, at times, in their own lives. The frustration is not that they couldn't achieve their dreams; it's that they weren't even able to start chasing them” (Timestamp 11:27). So many people emailed Tim about their procrastination problem, and he believes that there is no such thing as a “non-procrastionatior”. He tells the audience, that he thinks they are all procrastinators.

Overall Tim Urban made great use of rhetorical strategies. Tim tells his personal story on procrastinating. He uses an MRI scan on how non-procrastinators brain differs from the brain of someone who procrastinates, and finally, he uses the emails he got from all types of people around the world as statistical information to prove to his audience that tons of people struggle with procrastionation.