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Need to write a thesis?

Posted by Mark | Filed under Humor, Links

I was over at Kuro5hin and ran across an arti­cle titled How-To: Write your doc­toral the­sis. I’ve never felt a desire to go for a doc­tor­ate in any­thing, but I’ve had friends who have gone down that path of insan­ity, so I gave the arti­cle a quick look through and found it’s a rather funny piece. Here’s a sample:

HOKAY, SO: You’ve been a slave for untold years. You want to enter the glam­orous world where you can be pre­ten­tious and have peo­ple call you doc­tor. You want to have a silly hat and a cape. But to reach these goals, you need to pro­duce a doc­toral thesis.

The Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary defines ‘doc­toral the­sis’ as: A com­pletely worth­less doc­u­ment that will not be read, but which is appar­ently impor­tant to some­one, because it requires nearly impos­si­ble tasks to com­plete. This def­i­n­i­tion is spot on.

Another par­tic­u­larly good bit from near the end of the article:

It is a well known fact that the three body prob­lem of celes­tial mechan­ics has no solu­tion. For you, it is worse: you must get five pro­fes­sors to be in the same room, at the same time, and with as lit­tle ani­mos­ity towards you as pos­si­ble. Hint that free booze will be offered post-defense.

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