This is not fair. Writing a doctoral thesis on a blog? How about doing your masters thesis on a wiki? Don’t these people know you’re supposed to suffer when writing a thesis?
I remember mine. There were months of tapping it out on an Apple II computer, and occasionally printing it out on the clumsy old dot-matrix printer so my advisor could rip into it and rearrange everything. Then, finally, I’d hook the computer up to the daisy wheel printer the department owned, and print out the good “final” copy for my committee—this had to be done late at night, because it took about 6 hours to print it all. Then the committee hacked it up, I revised it, then back to the daisy wheel for another late night. Then off to the dreaded grad school office, where the proofreader whipped out a ruler and told me one of the margins was off by a sixteenth of an inch…back to the daisy wheel. Then the defense, and “suggestions” for some additions…daisy wheel. Grad school office. Extra space between paragraphs on page 57. Back.
It was hellish. So now the whippersnappers are streamlining the instruments of torture? I don’t know that I approve.
(I’m sure someone is going to gasp, “You had a computer? We used a typewriter!” And then someone’s going to announce that they had to set hot type, and we’ll get the quill pen stories, and the real oldsters will whine about chiseling hieroglyphics. Save it. My pain and exasperation will always outweigh your minor inconveniences.)
Oh, there’s also some useful information in that article about what Nature considers the kind of prior publication that would preclude publishing a work in their journal.
You had a computer?!?
I wrote my thesis with a pen then typed it my own self on an electric typewriter that I bought with my own money. My advisor told me that I had it easy because I could reproduce my thesis on a Xerox machine whereas he had to type multiple copies on a manual typewriter, on onion skin paper using 4 layers of carbon paper.
Did I mention that I typed in the snow? Uphill both ways.
Written in pen, double-spaced. Not typed (by secty/wife) till after it was approved. (Typing math while changing those selectric ball things was expensive)
Administrative problems, hellish formal requirements are the same old ones, what really changed is the technology behind. From the current technological perspective, the ideal solution would be a special tpye of website (somewhere between a blog and a wiki), where I can manage all the steps of making a thesis (defense included ad absurdum) and the offline printed version would cease to be playing the role it has today.
Margaret Cho (IIRC) said that her parents always complained about how hard they had it, growing up in Japan.
“When I was your age, they dropped two atom bombs on us!”
Top that!
Well, this reminds me of one of my favorite webcomics, Piled Higher and Deeper. One of the characters, actually, had the same problem of his margins being off by a decimal point. This comic, in case anyone is interested, lives at phdcomics.com, and is about the lives of grad students.
…Okay, maybe just grad students.
No cephalopods, but plenty of higher academia jokes. I think my favorite would have to be the one titled ‘Negation Field’.
Geez, PZ. You likely remember when you had to use interlibrary loan to find some obscure piece of relevant information that today can be had by a simple Google search.
;-)
Apple II’s 30th Anniversary.
It was on June 5, 1977 that the Apple II, the world’s first “practical” personal computer, went on sale.
neatorama
My poor mother was my father’s typist for his dissertation, all 360+ pages of it, much of it in German. And this was in the time before humanities departments had computers–she sat there and did three or four copies of the whole thing on a typewriter. Truly a labor of love.
You guys had hieroglyphics? Back in my day, we had to memorise these things!
Gasp! You had a computer for your MS? I (of course) used a manual typewriter. One page every 20 minutes to ensure no typos. Finis only 250 pp. later. At Ph.D. time, technology improved to a Dell PC with 4 megs Ram, a 40 meg hard drive and WordPerfect 3.0.– Graphs done with Apple’s Cricketgraph. Best graphics program of the time- still couldn’t do the multi-axial graphs I wanted. In the old, old days, famous naturalists such as Carl von Linne and Johannes Fabricius dictated theses to students whose ‘degree’ was dependent on their putting the material into passable Latin and bearing the costs of printing. Anything that allows students to spend more time thinking/researching and less time as a medievalist, G-R-E-A-T!
Even at my tender young age, when I started doing research I had to look up keywords in the big, heavy, absurdly tiny-fonted Biological Abstracts, page by page by page….
I also had to take real photos using 4×5 negatives and use an x-acto knife, a triangle, and a glue stick to put plates together. Ah, the good times.
This week I observed the second anniversary of filing my dissertation in the university’s graduate office and completing my degree requirements. I submitted a stack of hard copy and a Word file on a Zip disk. The submission clerk (hell of a job title) went through my entire manuscript page by page while I waited. It already had the signatures of my committee members, but it was her job to make the final pass. She noticed that one of my figures had the wrong numerical label, the result of a last-minute edit. She popped my document into Word and we made the correction right there. Sweet!
In many ways it was easier than my master’s thesis, filed 30 years earlier. That one I did on a Smith-Corona typewriter. It was a lot shorter than the doctoral dissertation but contained a lot more math (since I was earning a math degree, not a math education degree). The determinants were kind of difficult to type, especially since their dimensions were not always fixed. One was m^n by m^n. Oh, the fun I had trying to fill a page with that one and still make it readable. (I hope the nightmares don’t come back!)
Hmmm. I’ve always wanted to get an advanced degree in something or other, but by the time I get home from work I’m too worn-out to take on that big of a project. (I had more energy when I was younger, sigh.)
But if I’m allowed to use this new wiki technology, I should be able to manage. I can just set up a blank wiki with the thesis title, and then come back to it six months later and the Internet will have written it for me.
I checked the linked thesis up above, but all the pages were protected so I couldn’t make any edits. Some people are still a little unclear on the concept, I guess.
Old-School marine biologists did their thesis in Morse Code.
My favorite dissertation story involves my wife’s. She was away from campus for her internship year and had to telnet into the campus vax/vms via a 2400 baud modem card in our IBM 286 to run her statistical analyses. I was troubleshooting the flaky connection after her output kept coming back garbled (with the defense date looming and my wife freaking out) and found the culprit: the cat had chewed on the phone cord.
Now I suppose she could have done everything with R running on her ibook.
I remember “Piled Higher and Deeper”. I was at Stanford the same time the author was there, although I didn’t know him personally. That and the crossword were almost invariably the first thing my friends and I turned to in the school paper. As for my experience with the much-hyped and dreaded “magin-lady” (who does literally measure the margins on every page with a ruler while you stand there), my thesis passed on the first try, thanks in no small part to having written it in LaTeX. Double-sided (which looks great, except that my thesis looks particularly skinny next to the standard one-sided), alternating margins, lots of figures, lots of math. Table of contents, table of figures, signatures page all created automatically (it helped that someone there had written a good style file for the thesis format, but there was also a Word Template floating around there too that didn’t do any of that fun stuff for you.)
Sorry, someone had the be the smug LaTeX user, right? I certainly can’t compete with the old fogies here who had to type things by hand.
Oh, the margin lady. I had forgotten, I had forgotten. Getting past my committe was a breeze, but I think she just kept making up new rules for the fun of it. Either that, or she had stock in the company that made the paper I was printing on.
Wow, you were allowed to get away with handing in a double-sided printed Thesis? I would have had my intestines wound out on a pole by my supervisor if I’d tried that.
Morse code? Oh gods! (both of them) Can you imagine a thesis in cryptography? Even worse, having to examine the thesis.
Bob
Some people here have seen Monty Python stuff once too many :)
I typed my PhD on Word (couldn’t be bothered to learn Latex), printed all 263 pages in a few minutes (gotta love modern printers), and was lucky to be at a school that can tolerate margins a few milimiters off.
I wonder what typing theses in 30 years from now is going to be like.
One good thing about having a mac was that it was a snap to convert my document to PDF. The thesis office had long and detailed directions for how to convert the thesis to a PDF on a PC, but I could ignore them. Of course it still had to have margins just so etc. etc.
Clay Tablets and cuneiform. I win.
Just kidding, I’m only a silly undergrad.
O-dot-O – Margaret Cho’s parents are Korean, so maybe it was that the Japanese were dropping bombs on them?
I, for one, enjoy the stories of how theses used to be written. My father told a tale of how, if you wanted a different sized font for your letters, you had to go to the art store and buy rub-on letters. Nothing makes you appreciate LaTex like that.
Yes, and I thought that was a caricature of reality. I’m flabbergasted to read that it’s real!!!
Yes, and I thought that was a caricature of reality. I’m flabbergasted to read that it’s real!!!
I hear at Lascaux they had to engrave their thesis on a rock wall, and furthermore, they did it all in a dark cave. Oh, and winters were much colder and longer back then …
“Wow, you were allowed to get away with handing in a double-sided printed Thesis? I would have had my intestines wound out on a pole by my supervisor if I’d tried that.”
Why? I’m not talking about the intermediate versions that my advisor needed to cover in red pen, or the ones I gave to my committee: those I printed single-sided, as well as the version submitted for microfiche. But for the final printed version, why not go with what looks best? Books are printed double sided. It looks better and it saves paper. I know a lot of schools are stricter in their requirements, but I think that’s an archaic throwback to the time when people did have to type by hand. For that matter, I probably would have made it look more like a scientific article if I could have, but Stanford still required the typical 12 point font, double spaced lines. Why in the world should a thesis look like the version of an article originally submitted to a journal when it could look like a final, typeset version? I don’t really expect everyone to learn LaTeX either :-) but even Word is capable of producing something that looks more professional than the limitations imposed by the typical required thesis format.
Hieroglyphics on stone tablets? You lucky bastards. Back in my day, we had to invent stone before being able to chisel our thesis.
Oh, how I remember all those hours in the back of the Bentley, dictating my dissertation to Inga — my shorthand stenographer and lover — who would have it typed up by the twins, Barbie and Bobbi, who in turn would ship it to a quaint little shop in Kowloon where the individual letters would be hand-carved and pressed onto rice paper with india ink. Then I’d jet off to Morocco to meet with my advisor, a mysterious character known only as “Black Hans.” We would sit silently in the dimly lit souk for what seemed like days in a haze of flavored tobacco and hashish smoke. Finally he would raise his hand to my lips, and whisper cryptically, “Citations.” And so back to London to dictate more changes to Inga between bouts of strenuous lovemaking, then a three-way with the typist twins, then Kowloon, Morocco, Nairobi, Beunos Aires, yadda, yadda, yadda. I tell you, when the ninjas showed up, I was actually sorta relieved.
Of course we have it easy now, at least until we try and get a job that pays well and will last for more than a fortnight to pay off the loans :P
One of the most useful aspects of using the wiki is that, as her supervisor, most of my comments and her corrections are in the history. One of her committee members also agreed to use the wiki to give her feedback. She just printed out a version for the other member. And of course the final “official” version is a regular document. But the wiki version is still available for comments from anyone in the future.
I’m not sure the printed version plays a central role anymore, since it became popular to make a DVD release.
But an online thesis, or dedicated websites, is a really exciting development. Society moves slowly, but it is getting there.
Also, those of us that adds together years worth of papers and writes an introduction to frame it with, would have an incentive to get more of that work done before those last weeks. :-)
I’m not sure the printed version plays a central role anymore, since it became popular to make a DVD release.
But an online thesis, or dedicated websites, is a really exciting development. Society moves slowly, but it is getting there.
Also, those of us that adds together years worth of papers and writes an introduction to frame it with, would have an incentive to get more of that work done before those last weeks. :-)
Ummm. What’s a….
*scrolls up*
… a “typewriter”?
You think you had it rough?
In our day, we had to find individual letters from a random collection of coprolites!
The most traumatic part for me was submitting the first version to the postgraduate office. I walked down there in the snow with my thesis clutched to my chest, hoping that the 6 plastic bags I had wrapped around it would be enough. Then the secretary in the office just took it and tossed it on a huge desk covered in multiple other theses. I asked for a receipt or something to prove that I’d submitted it, and she looked at me like I was crazy. “A receipt? We don’t do that”.
At least when I submitted the final hard-bound copy I got a “well done”.
Wow, those people are/were evil! margins 1/16th of an inch off made them not accept it? That’s ridiculous.
I’m glad I was born not too long ago. By the time I have to write my thesis, I’ll probably do it in my blog too :P
I suffered through with only the Mac SE and dot-matrix printer. The SE crashed and I learned a valuable lesson about backing up my work, to the extent that I’m pretty much compulsive about it now.
But, oh… the margin lady. Luckily the margins on mine were passable, but we did spend some time arguing about the style in which I had done the “works cited” section. I had to point out the fine print in the rules that stated I didn’t have to use MLA (or whatever evil format she wanted) but that I could use the style of a professionally accepted peer-reviewed journal. It stopped short of me dragging in a copy of a journal and my major professor to testify that I hadn’t invented my own citation style, but that was nearly the hardest part of the whole thesis and defense process.
The hardest was the faxing of the whole thing to my major professor to shred, then faxing it again, and again, with the final return copy stating “You really can’t write, can you?” at the top.
I probably really annoyed my committee; I was paranoid about having the proper number of copies to submit to the office, losing any that I had, and/or having a horrible accident involving dropping the print copies in an unfortunately placed mud puddle on the way to the grad office, so I had them sign somewhere around 15 cover pages each.
I’m looking forward to they day when there is an efficient lab notebook program. Much of the thesis writing will then become cut and paste from the electronic notebook, or just publish the notebook.
Olive(Comment #23…any relation with Popeye?): Never mind the nationality of Margaret Cho’s parents. The story by O-dot-O (Comment #4) about the parents retorting to a complaining child with having it really bad when 2 atom bombs were dropped on them, made me laugh until tears came out of my eyes.
I remember when I entered graduate school in Mexico, 9 years ago. The department still had a photography area, so yo could take your electrophoresis gels or the photographic plates exposed to radioactivity or chemoluminiscence, and they would take a glossy B&W pictures of them that you used for the figures in the thesis and the paper(s). There would also be a specialized draughtsman that would assemble the photographs into figures, annotate them and add the text by hand in the same way it was done for architectural diagrams. Then they would take a glossy B&W picture of the whole assembly. We also had to consult MedLine in CD ROMs (one for each year) at the library. Most students would print their Power Point presentations into photographic slides, so they could show them using a caroussel projector. I was lucky my MS tutor had just arrived from a postdoctoral stay at NIH and brought with him a digital projector. Still, ZIP drives were rare among the deparment computers, and CD burning drives were rarer, so I had to divide my PowerPoint presentation file into several 3 1/2 diskettes using WinZip (I think it no longer has that option). And you really had to check everything was properly recorded into the diskette. Diskettes were so error prone that corrupted files weren’t an unusual problem, then you started the presentation and had to run back to the lab to make a new copy.
The Apple II 30 years old today so that’s a prescient comment. Sort of gives away your age too.
I know a few the ‘open review’ efforts been something of a bust but I am curious to see how the Wiki thesis gets received. JC is behind it 100% so it can’t go badly, but this is also one of those times when we don’t want pioneers to get an arrow in the back.
If creationist/ID get their way, you could easily text your doctoral thesis to a committee!
For example, in the doctoral thesis entitled: Protein Lol Expression Role in Bordetella mornonicis Pathogenicity
“God did it! God r0x0rz!”
Ha! You lucky bastards! I had to design and create an entire universe so I would have matter so I would have something to write my thesis on and with. Nobody around to proof it either…
Sonny, I wrote my thesis on cave walls. Top that, if you can.
@ Asher:
…..Looks like God just did.
Where in hell did you place the devil, isn’t he supposed to play the advocate here?
Where in hell did you place the devil, isn’t he supposed to play the advocate here?
Mom got beat by a pair of elderly Southern White Rhinos her first try at a masters thesis. Well them and traffic circa 1964.
It could’ve been worse though, it could’ve been cats.
These days, there are actually reputable institutions that offer masters degrees by coursework alone. Needless to say, this is none to popular among the sadistically deranged members of academia who believe everyone should have to put up with the same ‘1/16th of an inch’ crap they did.