I spent four years in graduate school at large state universities. Towards the end of that time, someone posted a copy of this Matt Groening cartoon on the bulletin board. (Bulletin boards were a primitive read/write social media structure, made from tree-bark, to which humans once attached printed sheets of paper using tiny steel pins. Think of them as two square meters of anonymous Facebook.)

It was late 1987 or early 1988 at the time. I had no idea who Matt Groening was, but the comic struck a chord with me as it did with so many students. Check out the poor chap in the lower left panel: halfway through my last year, one of the faculty members suddenly departed for a job in private industry on another continent, abandoning the students he had been advising. The students had to find new advisors and start over. I don’t know how many gave up and quit.

The phrase in the comic that originally caught my attention was “the stomach-churning agony of having to finish your thesis.” That phrase still goes directly to the core of why I’m writing in this phase of my life. Writing was never stomach-churning agony for me. It’s difficult and time-consuming, but it was never stomach-churning. Here’s a little story about that:

When I was working on my Master’s degree in 1984-1986, there were two paths to graduation–Thesis or Comprehensive Examination. I was 25 years old then, and new to Enormous State University academic politics, so I paid attention to what the other students were saying. The general consensus was that the Comprehensive Examinations (“Comps” for short) were a nightmare. Students had to pass three Comps, each of which covered a different specialty of computer science. The tests themselves varied in difficultly and emphasis, depending on which faculty member drew the short straw and had to write the questions. Some students said that if Professor X was writing the Comp that year, you had to take his class in Specialty Y to have any hope of passing. An even shorter straw was reserved for the unfortunate faculty member who had to grade the Comps. The answers were complicated. This was not learning by rote, where every question had a simple and exact answer. This was graduate school, with multiple approaches to any given problem. Knowing a student made it easier for the grader to differentiate between minor misunderstandings and outright incompetence, but it also led to hints of favoritism. There could be partial credit, but that was nearly impossible to quantify objectively and led to additional complaints.

On the other hand, to go the Thesis route, a student had to find an advisor, do some work for that advisor (for course credit!), write up the work (for course credit!), and get three faculty members into a room for a one-hour presentation called the Thesis Defense. The last step was often feared, but if the student was well-prepared, the defense was largely a formality. Mind you, “well-prepared” included making certain to select faculty members who didn’t hate the advisor and who knew the student, but that wasn’t hard to figure out. Despite the apparent simplicity of the Thesis route, the student consensus was “I can’t face the thought of writing a paper that big.”

Really? They thought that writing a single 100-page paper was the unclimbable greased pole? I couldn’t understand why students would choose the Comps (which were, in fact, three greased poles of unknown height). Thirty-five years later, I still don’t understand, but I can at least accept that they honestly felt that way. (When I was 25, I just thought they were idiots.)

Back then, I couldn’t articulate the difference between the two processes quite as well as I can today, but even then I could sense it intuitively. The prevailing myth was that the Thesis was subjective and the Comps were objective. The subjectivity of the Thesis route was obvious. The Comps route appeared objective to the careless observer, but even a cursory examination revealed a process riddled with subjective decisions. The fundamental difference was not in the question of objectivity or subjectivity, but in the feedback available to the student. Students taking the Comps received no feedback until after the tests were graded. Students writing a Thesis had feedback at all stages of the process: searching for an advisor, doing their research, and writing. The feedback wasn’t formal (until the end), but it was there if the student paid attention to the advisor.

So, as you might guess, I took the easy road. I did research on models for a semester, then I spent the next semester re-doing the models and writing it up. I was able to achieve in two years (while working half-time) something that took other students three or four years, just because I wasn’t afraid to write.