Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/17/grad-student-defended-her-diss.html
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Obligatory thesis defense comic:
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“The whole process of revisiting those old letters and making that skirt sort of reminded me that you have to apply to a lot of things to succeed,” she said. “A natural part of the process is to get rejected along the way.”
See, Boomers, young people aren’t as entitled and spoiled as you say they are.
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Okay, 99.5% of me is amused and pleased at her cleverness. But there is a part of me, as an aging academic, that has to think “God, why do the kids gotta do weird shit all the damned time?”
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I would try something like that and I am not a kid anymore. In body anyway.
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As far as weird shit goes this is super tame. It has a great message about resilience in the face of adversity too.
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Obligatory thesis defense McSweeny’s:
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I think it beats killing your supervisor with a hammer after 19 years of working on your thesis. But that’s just me.
Oh, and I was told he called his victim “an academic disgrace” while committing the crime but the wiki doesn’t confirm that detail.
I have personally seen two academic geologists in a fistfight over whether or not there was an ice free corridor between the Laurentide ice sheet and the Cordilleran at the peak of the last ice age. Again, I prefer Ms. Kirby’s lower-key approach to fisticuffs
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If she received her degree in Fine Art, maybe this was performance art, and she should receive credit.
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Now that she can start applying for academic jobs she’ll be able to make a tent city out of rejection letters 
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Can I just say that I remain violently opposed to the convention that “the data” is plural. I get the background, I understand the latin root, but I just fucking hate the way it looks and sounds. Language evolves, so let’s evolve this motherfucker.
Imagine a silent “set” after each use of data, and you definitely should do that because inevitably whenever you are talking about data you are talking about a set of data that is being analysed, not a single point.
The data (set) are … does that sound right? No.
The data (set) show … does that sound good to your ear? No. No it does not.
The data (set) shows …
The data (set) is …
Yeah, baby. Now we’re talking.
Also: congratulations Ms Kirby, you have earnt and deserve this!
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Datum
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Gesundheit.
Tell me, when was the last time you used “agendum”?
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things
It’s time to put childish things away 
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Grown up is way over rated. I am a pediatrician, I get to stay juvenile on a professional basis!
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My advisor gave me a button that said “Don’t Panic” and pinned it on my suit jacket, I assumed for my committee to see. Fortunately none of them did.
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Back when I had the great timing to graduate with an aerospace engineering degree just as the Soviet Union was collapsing I quite literally wallpapered my bedroom with rejection letters. Somehow it made my housemates sadder than it made me.
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Boomers just saw that quote as “You have to cut open a lot of avocados to get a ripe one for your avocado toast.”
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The saddest thing about that avocado toast BS: it sounds like something a Boomer would say, but it was started by a Millenial trust fund twit.
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It was probably easier for her to do given the number of grants and awards she has won. For her less-successful peers something like this would probably be too depressing to contemplate.
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0.5% of someone on your committee likely had similar questions about you.
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