I spent four years in graduate school at large state universities. Toward the end of that time, someone posted this Matt Groening “Life In Hell” cartoon on the bulletin board. (For youngsters out there, bulletin boards were a primitive read/write social media structure, made from tree-bark, to which humans once attached sheets of paper using tiny steel pins. Think of them as two square meters of non-hyperlinked anonymous Facebook.)

I had no idea who Matt Groening was at the time. (The Simpsons were still in their early lives on The Tracy Ullman Show.) But the comic struck a chord with me as it did with so many of my fellow students. Check out the miserable chap in the lower left panel. He probably had an experience like this real-life example: Halfway through my last year of graduate school, a faculty member suddenly departed for a job in private industry on another continent, promising to return after his sabbatical. He didn’t. His students had to find new advisors and start over. I don’t know how many of them gave up.

But this isn’t about Grad School Gone Wrong. This is about the phrase that originally caught my attention: “…the stomach-churning agony of having to finish your thesis.” 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. Students could choose between writing a Thesis or taking a series of Comprehensive Examinations (“Comps” for short). I was a small-town 25-year-old, new to grad school, and terrified of Enormous State University academic politics, so I listened carefully to what the more experienced students were saying about the process. The general consensus was that the Comps were a nightmare. Students had to pass three Comps in three different specialties of computer science. The tests changed each year, and some students said that if Professor X wrote the Comp for Specialty Y, you had to take his class in it to have any hope of passing. And no one had a kind word for the grading process. Like any science exam, the questions generally had one correct answer. A student might get partial credit for a partially solved problem, but “partial” is nearly impossible to quantify objectively. If the grader knew the student, they might differentiate between a minor misunderstandings and outright incompetence, but that also led to claims of favoritism.

On the other hand, to go the Thesis route, students had to find an advisor (on their own), do some work for that advisor (for course credit!), write up the work (for more 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 being kind to secretaries and selecting faculty members who didn’t hate the advisor, but that wasn’t hard to figure out. Despite the apparent simplicity of the Thesis route, the student consensus was to go with the Comps. They said, “I can’t face the idea of writing a paper that big.”

Really, I thought? Is writing a single 100-page paper truly the unclimbable greased pole? Did they not understand their own complaints about the Comps–that the exams were, in fact, three greased poles of unknown height? Thirty-five years later, I still don’t understand their perspective, 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 Thesis and Comps as well as I can now, but even then I sensed it intuitively. The prevailing mythology asserted that the Thesis was subjective and the Comps were objective, but that simply wasn’t true. Even a cursory examination revealed that the Comps were plagued with subjective choices. The fundamental difference was not in the question of objectivity or subjectivity, but in the availability of feedback to the student. Students taking a Comp got no feedback until after the test was graded, and by then it was too late to do anything but beg for partial credit. Students writing a Thesis got feedback at every stage of the process, which gave them plenty of chances to fix everything before the Thesis Defense.

So, as you might guess, I took the easy road and wrote a Thesis. It wasn’t great science (very few Masters Theses are), but I was able to achieve in two years something that took other students three or four years, only because I wasn’t afraid to write.

Because of Good Omens and a friend’s fandom for The Hogfather, I’ve recently been reading some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Yesterday, I finished reading Moving Pictures. I won’t write a review or commentary, because (much as Sam Gamgee said when asked what he thought of Elves) Sir Terry is a bit above my likes and dislikes. It doesn’t matter what I think. I will, however, single out a line for praise. It describes the exit of the troll Detritus as he “loped off”:

“His trailing knuckles left two furrows in the dust.”

We often use the word “drag” when talking of knuckles. We write of knuckles dragging the ground or people who are “knuckle-draggers.” But “trailing knuckles” sound like knuckles that were made to glide along the ground behind their owner, not intentionally, like the knuckles of the gorilla who uses them for locomotion, nor semi-consciously, like the knuckles of the stunned athlete who has discovered too late that glory is transient, but artlessly, like knuckles that evolved for millions of years into that position and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

I also love “left two furrows in the dust” because of the perspective it uses. The phrase creates a visual in the reader’s mind, not from the action itself, but from the action’s effect on the environment–the footprint, not the foot, as it were.

Overanalysis? Certainly. But that’s who I am. I can’t help it.

While Meg is attending the IGMA Guild School this week, I’m taking care of the horse and the chickens. I tried to write a post about the experience, but I’m not really an animal person, so nothing I wrote about the animals was any good. I threw it out.

Chickens made me think about my grandparents, all of whom grew up working on farms. Personally, I don’t mind working all day if I’m writing or designing. It could be software, documentation, fiction, non-fiction… it doesn’t matter. But I’ve never been a fan of physical labor, and because of that, I always felt as if I didn’t quite measure up to my grandparents’ standards. I tried to write a blog about that, but the more I worked on it, the less I liked it. I threw it out.

Then I realized that I had missed an important point: By the time my grandparents were in their early twenties, they had all left their family farms. They didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives working that hard, either. They worked hard at their new careers, but it wasn’t as physically taxing as the farm work. So maybe it’s not so bad that I went into computer engineering and spent my entire working career indoors with air conditioning.

Writing is difficult, but it’s not hard work like farming. The time goes by quickly. Sometimes I sit down and write for what feels like an hour, only to have the clock say that three or four hours have passed. That’s not a bad working definition for “a job that’s enjoyable.”