According to multiple sources in Lantana, sophomore Toby Maxwell has expressed his concern that his paper’s page count would not fall within the bounds his professor set for a course on convolutional neural networks.
“I totally feel your struggle right now,” Toby said to some of his fellow dorm-mates, who were desperately trying to write their RBAs after a weekend of partying. “I just don’t see how I’m going to get my paper below this 15-page maximum. I keep looking for things to cut or shorten, but changing anything would just be doing a disservice to the reader and myself. I can’t see how I can maintain the integrity of my argument without including everything.”
After taking some time to explain the beauty of his neural network architecture diagrams to his friends, Maxwell resolved to take a different approach to shortening his paper.
“I’m going to do some serious formatting magic to get under the page max,” Maxwell announced to the interest of absolutely no one in his dorm.
Changing his paper’s font from 11 pts.
Times New Roman to 9.5 pts. Garamond, Maxwell found his paper was tantalizing close to the maximum length. He also used the ever-popular trick of making the period of each sentence one point font smaller than the rest of the paper.
“Look guys, it’s working!” he exclaimed as his friends put on their noise-cancelling headphones and shared eye rolls with each other.
“Garamond is great because it shortens your papers and uses less ink, which means I’m helping myself and the planet.”
Maxwell was last seen shrinking his margins from .9 inches to .7 inches and raising his fists high above his head after his paper became 15 pages, only to drop his hands in dismay as he realized he “absolutely needed” to caption all the plots showing the “incredibly low error” for his model’s fit of the data.
“Hopefully, I’ll find some way to make it work by midnight,” said Maxwell, distressed.
“This is the closest I’ve ever cut it to any deadline before.”
