And well, I've completely hit a roadblock. Here are the steps I took:
1. Created a NURBS hair surface to make a basic blocked out shape.
2. Ran many CV curves down the NURBS object - these curves would be where the hairs grow out.
3. Created a simple plane, selected it and clicked "Create Hair" under the Hair tab. Hairs grew out of the plane, and therefore I now have a new hair system called "hairSystemShape1".
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4. Selected all the CV curves of my soon-to-be hair. Clicked "To Hair Systems" so that I could select the new hairSystemShape1 system to assign to my CV curves.
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5. Nothing happens at all. No hairs grow out and I'm not shown any option to select a hair system.
I desperately need help on this since it's due in a week. I'm not sure if this has to do with the problem, but the tutorial I'm following seems to be an earlier version than 2013, which is what I'm using.