I just got through with the whole RRoD fiasco about a month ago. It only took about a week and a half including shipping time to get it back though. MS's service was really speedy.
I remember when I got the DRE with the PS2 it took about a month to get it back from Sony. That was around Christmas time too. Legacy of Kain: Defiance and a few other games were waiting in a pile for Mr. PS2 to come back home.
I contacted ES about that edit a few hours after it - he meant to edit one of the posts above mine. That was back when a bunch of old topics were being revived by new users. I could have sworn that he fixed that edit in my post back then - oh well.
Good luck on that, man. I always got some of my best work done at the last minute when I was back in school.
Don't forget to proofread - grammatical errors were always one thing that many fellow students in my class would loose the most points for and one thing that I always made sure to look for in my papers.