(NOTE: This really wasn’t very funny near the end. I apologize, but it felt good to talk about it. On Monday we resume with stupid jokes and laughing at dogs.)
And here we are at the thrilling conclusion of The Shumate Guide To Graduate School! Will I get my Ph.D.? Will I get a job? You already know the answers, but read on anyway!
I had already spent five years in graduate school, gleaning what data I could from instruments that spent more time being broken than not. I knew that my time would be over soon, but I didn’t understand what circumstances would finally push me through the door. My graduate advisor was more than willing to give me a little incentive.
“Well, I’m out of money, you need to get a job.”
But I couldn’t get a job! I still had a dissertation to write, and teaching positions to apply for! Thankfully, another professor had some money available, and he hired me as a sort of graduate student mercenary: research for coin. I would work mornings in his lab and spend afternoons writing my dissertation.
The dissertation. It strikes fear into many the heart of a graduate student. I had to take a seemingly-unconnected set of data and build it into a coherent document. I did what any wise scholar would do: I put a lot of graphs into as many pages as possible and wrote around it. I ordered the graphs using the reliable method of putting the prettiest ones first. I also had lots of sentences that began like “Figure 1 obviously shows the importance of the experiment, in that Figure 1 clearly illustrates the relationship seen in Figure 1, namely that Figure 1 is indeed, in fact a graph that shows…”
This is the most important lesson in graduate school: you can never repeat yourself too much.
You can never repeat yourself too much.
When I was finished, I had a 150-page document that my advisor and I proofread. And proofread again. And finally proofread a third time, fixing mistakes we made the first two times. The thing was ready to print and distribute to my committee.
The committee had a few weeks to look at the dissertation, and then we convened for the defense. “Defense” is far too mild a word for it: I was locked into a room with five men who all had Ph.D.s, and they were intent on finding reasons for me not to get one. It wasn’t being mean-spirited, they just wanted to make sure that they didn’t let any old goober into their club. I spent four hours defending my work. At one point I think I started crying a little bit. But it was over, and we had drinks and congratulations.
Just in time for the money to run out and for me to take one of the first jobs available.
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