Hey, recently I started taking some classes that require me to write a paper in order to pass the final exam. However, the professors pay zero attention to us and they don't actually teach us stuff at all. But as I said, they expect us to do some good-looking papers that will pass "the criteria" and get published in some (low-tier) journal. As an example of what they expect, I'd like to point that they've been teaching us some basic neural nets that I've heard about at least 20 times and now expect us to do some graph-neural-network related works or graph-convolutional-network etc.

I passed one of the exams and did TONS of time-series related work because I wanted to learn new stuff but to be honest, I got more stress lost nerves instead of knowledge and if I have to pick between a peaceful mind and knowledge with tons of stress, I'd go for the peace for X reasons.

Can I have some tips from some experienced researches about how can I "fast-forward" the whole thing and easily make some researches that will be enough for a paper? I had on my mind the following: find a paper with code that does a classification on the X dataset, get the code and do a classification on my dataset. Is this a good idea? If not, can I have more ideas and points about how should I get better?