How Ghost Disappeared And What Happened Afterwards · 6:57am May 10th, 2018
You may have noticed that I've sort of been... missing. Missing might be the word. Being even worse at answering chat messages, e-mails, phone calls, carrier pigeons, and the odd note stuck to my front door with a jeweled damascene dagger (you know who you are).
Let me explain.
See, I was deep, deep in the Word Mines of Verbum VII writing. You'll be pleased to know it wasn't a ponyfic I planned to inflict on the rest of you, no, it's my thesis I've been working on.
Don't act so surprised. 'Grad student' was in my bio for ages and ages. And the thing about being a grad student is that they eventually want you to produce a thesis. They get quite insistent about it, no less. So I did. All 270 pages of it. Writing this took some considerable time, as you may imagine, and an even greater store of my remaining sanity. Hence my absence. Um. Sorry.
But the important thing is that the bulk of the work is now done. I've sent it off to various people to kvetch and complain about and once that's done it's going off to various and varying committees, commissions, councils, and conclaves to be deliberated upon, discussed, and then buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighter. So I'm not out of the woods yet, but I will have more time to enjoy the sheer horribleness of it all and/or distract myself with ponies.
Speaking of ponies: Further international recognition of my many scribbles. The incomparable gelirhil ably aided by the equally difficult to compare Litho have gone and translated the entirety of Obiter Dicta into Russian. Вот рассказ. I have offered minimal authorial aid in the translation (mostly by saying things like "Yes, that's what I meant" or "No, no, you are right I did need a comma there.") and can vouch for its excellence, as much as my limited Russian and my limitless faith in the two gentlemen I mentioned above will allow.
Either way, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I am, in some sense, back now and should be a marginally better correspondent. I mean I still work, like, four jobs but...
Wow, congrats on completing your Thesis. Revisions ahead, of course, but getting the bulk of the work done must feel good!
No feeding it to large wild animals at some point?
Also, I need that dagger back, for reasons.
Congratulations on blog number 99 too.
Sincere kudos on the progress of your thesis.
You can't write pony words if you're dead, so take care of yourself as best you can.
Conglaturation and such!
I see what you did there.
I look forward to the marginal increase in your presence here.
If the scientific establishment in Redactestan is anything like it is in Obscuria, you are far, far from done, because the stack of documents you will need to prepare before defending the thesis will be about half as thick as the thesis itself.
And when I realized that, that was the point when I started smoking.
Congratulations on your thesis and on reaching this miles-stone. May the road ahead hold fewer voices from the beyond whisper demented secrets in your ear in the dead of the night.
Because that's the way theses work, right?
Welcome back!
I'm glad that the mines of Verbium VII didn't collapse on you; I hear that's a problem sometimes.
Add me to the congratulatory chorus. That's no small feat, not that you need me telling you that.
Bravo! You'll soon be a master/expert/guru/doctor/emperor in <insert subject>.
Congratulations and welcome back! We will be eagerly waiting for whatever you can write for us, if you get the time.
Thoug, I gotta say, a really missed opportunity to continue:
"Let me explain."
With
"I'm actually a real ghost, and that actually makes very complicated physically writing in the site".
Congrats!
Ooooo congrats. Here's hoping it all turns out well!
Better than some ways this blog post might have gone!
Ooh, that's good! Will you be Doctor Ghost, or Master Ghost, or what?
There are worse reasons to go dead silent for a year. Good luck on your thesis! I have had but a small taste of that he'll, and there is nothing quite as exhilarating as Amazon deleting all the annotations on your copy of The Social Contract less than a week before you're supposed to hand over your research notes to your advisors. Fun times, that.
I can’t begin to imagine writing a 270 word paper. Blows my mind. Congratulations!
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Thank you kindly for the congratulations, well-wishes and the like.
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Check your front door...
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See, now I have to think of something suitably awesome for post #100. I did lose 67 pounds recently, but that seems a bit too self-involved and there's hardly anything to write about.
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Academic bureaucracy and the Vogons share a surprising number of similarities. The fact that I want to feed my very former thesis advisor (who is the cause of me not writing this post way, way sooner) to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts of Traal is merely one of them.
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The stack of documents I had to file to get this far is precisely sixty three unique pages. I counted. The necessary nonsense for my quals was particularly grueling.
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Such has been my experience, yes. In fact, there's something Lovecraftian about writing the damned thing. You lock yourself in your rooms, venturing out rarely and usually at the dead of night. You mutter indecipherable incantations, and fill page after page of meticulous scribble and arcane notation that costs sanity just to read. With each passing day you grow more pale, more wan, and more unlike a human being. In the end, you either die, or are forever changed and Other.
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PhD in Applied Computer Science.
I know, they give them to just about anyone these days.
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...darn. I regret not taking the choice, I must confess.
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Amen, brother. Amen.
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Doctor Ghost, apparently. If it all goes well.
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Ouch. Worst that happened to me is Moon Reader Plus(otherwise brilliant) eating my meticulous notes on a friend's book. Still peeved about that one.
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In FimFic terms, about 90k words. Though there's a lot of tables and pictures and equations and things which mess with the page count and which seldom feature in fics.
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Mmm. Also Scholar's Lung, of course. And accumulations of deadly and explosive research gases. Luckily, I had an undergrad in a birdcage that helped considerably.
Speaking of those lovely Russian chaps, Please assure them, I still have their gift carefully prepared to be given to you this summer.
Congratulations, Ghost!
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but...
i.imgur.com/Ql2g4eR.png
...not exactly a past-tense affair.
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It also sometimes involves old professors leaving cryptic advice, who disappear without warning, and when you try to get some hints about their whereabouts, you get contradictory information, hostile dismissals, and possibly a mysterious E-Mail (we are in the 21st Century after all) telling you to mind your own business.
Congrats on finishing the thesis! Be sure to mount a spirited defence of it as and when it's challenged. Use a sword for this purpose.
Congratulations!
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Will do. Also, am looking forward to gift. :) I should really make a post to sync-up with other con-goers.
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I should have used 'has been' there. But mentally I was already in the phase where I remove it and put something else. "Pretty pony prose peddlin' postdoc" comes to mind.
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"And Professor Smith was never heard of again."
"Eldritch horrors?"
"Sabbatical."
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The best thesis defense is a good thesis offense. Well known fact.
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Thank you very much. The return note was a nice touch.
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I fully support this.
Congrats very much!!
Now, onward... to tenure!
When I was working on my dissertation, I was in a university, like most universities in the US, where the professors couldn't get grants because it wasn't Harvard or MIT. (Fun fact: MIT gets on the order of a thousand times as many grant dollars per student as typical American colleges. Yale currently has an endowment of about $3 million dollars per student and grad student enrolled--and makes enough profit from tuition that they never have to touch the endowment. I believe that if you work out the numbers, you'd find MIT and all of the ivies are a net drain on the economy, because the results coming out of them, while impressive, are not as great as the results that would have been produced had the astounding amounts of money and attention thrown at them by government, industry, private donors, news media, and venture capitalists instead been distributed among all the other universities in America.)
As a result, most of the professors in my department wanted students either to (a) do the gruntwork for the profs own research--which, however, would not count as research, and so could not be made into a dissertation, or (b) go away. As a result, the average time spent as a grad student was 8 years.
As a result, the department was told it would lose accreditation unless it reduced average time to graduation to less than 8 years. As a result, the department announced a new policy: Everyone who had not graduated by the end of their 8th year would be kicked out, effective at the end of that academic year.
I was, of course, in my 8th year at the time.
So I went to my advisor, who I'd been meeting with twice a month (dissertation advising in my department often meant "a ten-minute conversation once or twice a month") for 3 years, during which all he had done was correct my grammar. I said, "Look, I've got all these experimental results, and all these chapters of dissertation written. What more do I need to defend?"
And he looked at me and said, "The truth is, I don't understand anything you're doing, and I don't want to understand it."
It turned out he had become philosophically opposed to my work about 6 months in, when I had turned from symbolic logic, to developing connectionist methods for focusing attention on the propositions in that logic. Symbolists and connectionists were then having a bitter war, one the symbolists were to lose so completely that, but for tenure, they would have vanished like the dinosaurs. I had thought that the obvious correct response to the war was to show how to bridge the gap between logic and neurons, but all that did was make my work incomprehensible to both sides, each of whom understood only half of it.
So I went to another professor, showed her my work, and she took me on and had me write up the first half of my work and submit it, and I defended about 2 weeks before my deadline.
I don't know if anyone on my committee read my thesis. The most important thing I did at my defense was to bring donuts. Bring the professors lots of donuts. Donuts will make them happy and sleepy, which is the key to a successful defense.
Epilogue: My PhD turned out to be worthless. I was never able to get a job that was intended for a PhD, and having a PhD only made it more difficult to get jobs that were meant for someone with a BS or MS. But that was largely my own fault, for not having the social sense to play the PhD game right. The academic world is, counter-intuitively, a place where intellect and ability are not very important, and success relies mainly on marketing, social skills, and reading the unwritten rules.
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What can I say, I memorized Explosive Runes today. ;)
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Alliteration aficionado, eh?
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Thank ye kindly.
The snobbery of academia has, I must confess, made me somewhat disgusted with it as a whole. The number of papers I've seen published which are clearly just reworked copies of earlier research or are even just gibberish but have a fancy name or affiliation... Jesus.
Exactly the same thing happened here. Here it is the result of grad students and postdocs doing, and I'm not even kidding here, all of the work. All of it. I prepared the curriculum, I prepared and taught lectures, prepared and graded exams the whole thing while doing about half of my thesis advisor's research. The other half was taken up by a postdoc beholden to him as part of some sort of semi-feudal thrall system.
It's not that bad everywhere, but my thesis advisor was the devil.
...the person who's now my thesis advisor (not officially for stupid bureaucratic reasons but in actuality, with the blessing of the department head who's acquired people to serve as my de jure thesis advisors) did half the research and actually knows, in detail, what the thesis is about. I sit about three feet away from him in the same office most days and he phones me about as frequently as my parents do.
I need to appreciate him more.
...damn. I am impressed you did not deck the man.
I eventually did much the same but mine involved going to the department head, turning him to my side, getting him to go into open war with my thesis advisor, get the dean on my side also, and finagle someone else. Normally switching professors like you did is Not Done here. Part of the whole feudal arrangement.
I make a brioche with honey-brandy that might provide a hit of covert booze to the proceedings...?
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Best of luck with the defense and whatever other things still stand between you and the doctorate!
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*coughs* Not bad, but a trap like that should probably be maximized. Good thing I put the dagger away first, though.
Congratulations, and best of luck with the defense!
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Ouch.
Other Fun Adventures in Baby's First Academic Thesis I had:
1) Reading Robespierre's speeches and finding out he sounded like just as much of a cartoonish fascist caricature as he acted.
2) Being the only one between myself and my two advisors who actually cared about the project deadlines.
3) Getting to find and highlight several obvious and hard logical fallacies Jean-Jacques Rousseau made in The Social Contract.
4) Finding out that, despite my thesis originally hinging on the two being different, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke basically agreed on 98% of everything.
5) Sending an email to my advisors at 11:00 P.M. the day before the first full draft is due that I may be late given I am 20-ish hours into my day and I have spent the last 10 working and only finished my fifty page outline of notes and quotations and I was starting to get just slightly fatigued, then getting emails back from each of them telling me to please for the love of god sleep no one cares about the deadline it isn't worth it.
6) Giving up and highly truncating part of my thesis because I had neither the time, sources, or resources to properly argue about it.
7) After handing in said draft on a dual subject of history and philosophy, getting the feedback from my philosophy advisor that my philosophy was iffy, but he felt all the history stuff seemed solid, whereas my history advisor thought the history was sloppy but the philosophy was really good.
8) Having my philosophy advisor seemingly miss a negative qualifier in a sentence, interpret the sentence to mean the exact opposite of what it meant and going on an entire page margins spanning rant in red about how stupid Ayn Rand was based on said misinterpretation.
9) Trying desperately not to cry in the family den after having gotten the feedback on the first draft.
10) Giving my presentation to the committee with a Twilight Sparkle miniature figurine in my front pocket for good luck.
11) Getting an award for outstanding scholarship and achievement in my major for that whole affair that also literally fell apart after a few months.
I call it; The Diploma!
Congratulations! Mind telling us what your argument is?
Congratulations on getting the writing done, and good luck with the revising and defense and such!
Real Life concerns come first! We don't mind you needing to complete your thesis :) Is it on anything particularly enlightening? (hopes for Dotty like plans to send parliament into orbit)
Hope all goes well!
I'm afraid that I don't know what all this Defence stuff means; but I'm guessing you can't just threaten to blackmail them if they don't agree with you? I guess the Brioche might work....
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That surprises me! Can you give examples?
We should definitely hijack Ghost's talk about his personal problems to compare Rousseau and Locke. He probably won't even mind if you do it like this:
(later comment replying to earlier comment:)
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It was a volume of Aristotle, not Heraclitus.
But I've found the boar's head tastes the same no matter whose book you jam down its throat.
Congratulations! Be proud of your accomplishment, and I hope it leads to even better things :-)
Congratulations!
Congrats, and welcome back!
General congrats and cautious optimism for more ghostposting.
We're proud of you Ghost, and don't you damn forget it.
Nerd.
:)
That means you can figure out how to build a portal to Equestria, right?
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It's a shame, isn't it. Academia prides itself on being free of those restraints. But the only way it could be is if it had no people in it. What you end up with instead is an institute in denial.
Congrats! Writing the 10 pages of my bachelor's thesis took me long enough already, so I can't really imagine writing 30 times as much
Looking forward to hearing more from Dr. Ghost!