I think it’s too late for them to take away my doctorate, and I do have a tinge of guilt about what I’m about to tell you. It’s all above-board legally, but just a little toe-below-the-deck ethically.
Probably explains why I went into marketing.
The year was nineteen eighty-nine. My thesis was finished, handed in, signed-off by everyone on my committee. The remaining hurdle was the oral defense.
Traditionally you prepared a one-hour talk about your thesis and presented it to your committee and anyone else who wanted to come: family, friends and also any mean colleagues who knew that you made it through quantum mechanics by the skin of your teeth and probably hadn’t collected enough data to stuff a small throw pillow.
Todd, you know who I’m talking about. I’m not even giving you a codename to protect your identity, you meanie.
By department convention these talks always started at two pee-em. You’d bring chips and salsa to pad your audience with hungry, vendetta-free students. By tacit agreement no one touched the snacks until your talk was over. Then everyone dug into the chips and salsa and the floor opened for questions.
In theory any audience member could ask you any question within the whole body of physics, materials science and physical chemistry, but in practice people were kind and asked questions only about your thesis topic. After that was a closed-door session for your half-dozen committee members only, and behind those doors they decided your fate. Or at least one part of your fate: whether or not you’d done enough to be granted a pee-aitch-dee at their fine institution.
It's like Groundhog Day, except the result skewed heavily toward winter being over, whew.
There were stories of people who were denied degrees or asked to do more work, but I think those stories were just to scare us. No one actually knew of any real person who verifiably didn't pass. This was true for my department, applied physics at Stanford. Your results may vary.
Most students spent the last couple of months before their oral exam reviewing all of their courses, preparing for the possibility that someone would ask them a question outside the narrow confines of their thesis topic. I was defeated enough by having been in school for twenty years that I decided to lean heavily on the likelihood that all, or almost all, in any case enough of my questions would be directly relevant to my thesis topic. And I could handle those pretty well, I figured.
Turned out to be true. There was one rogue question, from the aforementioned Todd. He asked some obscure question about electron-photon processes during fluorescence. I flubbed it of course, hadn’t thought about fluorescence since college, except noticing that a lot of people transpose the u and the o when they’re trying to spell fluorescence.
It wasn’t a big deal, my flub. The room was against him. Most people figured out that he was just trying to expose my inadequacy.
Thirty years later, Todd gave a talk at the company I worked for, MNC. I hadn’t thought of him in years. When I remembered why I associated that name with a feeling of resentment, I didn’t go to his talk.
Ha! That showed him.
So back then, instead of studying for my oral defense, I decided to control as much of the situation as I could. Here’s where I reveal my deviousness.
The first thing: Could I change the time of the talk? I was and am a morning person, and I’d do better in the morning. That’s what I told my advisor, and it’s true. My advisor said, Sure! It’s never been done before, but I don’t see why not.
So I went to the department secretary and scheduled my one-hour presentation for eleven ay-em. By the time my talk was over at noon, everyone would be hungry and they wouldn’t want to stay long and ask questions, right? I’d supply some inadequate little snacks, just enough to make them long for a real lunch.
Second, there was an evil professor in the physics department named Professor Horrible. He was a frumpy, pale man with small piggy eyes and short, spiky boarish hair, and he loved to stand up in the middle of one of the Tuesday Applied Physics seminars to which we invited distinguished guests, wait until everyone looked at him, and then proclaim loudly, You’re wrong! And then he would sit down.
I went next door to the physics department and asked his secretary when Professor Horrible would be out of town. Scheduled my presentation on one of those days.
Eleven o’clock—check. Professor Horrible—check. The last and weirdest thing I did was buy some bright aqua-colored contact lenses. They made me look like an alien. I figured if anyone asked me a question I couldn’t answer, I’d stare them down and unnerve them with my peculiar eyes.
I forgot to tell you: Besides all this scheming, I put together a kick-ass presentation on my thesis topic. This was in the era before PowerPoint, so preparing my presentation involved hand-lettering and drawing graphs with colored markers on acetate sheets.
It all worked out. My colorful presentation went smoothly. Todd asked me the one stupid fluorescence question that I flubbed. Everyone got hungry, and they gave me a doctorate at the end of a record-short closed-door session.
If they take away my doctorate now, I don’t care. I don’t need it to write stories or enjoy bike rides.
This story is dedicated to my daughter-in-law, Hom, who passed her qualifying exam a couple of hours ago, and to my son, Max, who is in his first year of graduate school and has all of that ahead of him. Neither of them is in need of bright aqua contact lenses. They know their stuff.
[Photo creds: The Interwebs. I probably didn't look that cool, but that's how I felt. ]
Comments