Of special interest to Nathan, evidence that the process of dissertation writing is the same across disciplines:
> work on dissertation
You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation.
> work on dissertation
You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball.
> tear out hair
Taken. You find the Elvish sword.
(Today's a Lab Day, so you're mostly getting silly posts...)
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The other day, it occurred to me that I have a goodly number of friends who have been in Ph.D. programs (and may still be "in" the program in some more or less official way), and who have more or less finished their graduate research, but who haven't managed to get their dissertations written.
One of my graduate students reminded my co-instructors and me of a fun internet tool called Wordle which takes tex
"I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed.
Many doctoral institutions now accept and archive (or are planning to accept and archive) theses and dissertations electronically. Virginia Tech pioneered this quite some time ago, and it has caught on slowly but steadily for reasons of cost, convenience, access, and necessity.
When I saw "work on dissertation" together with "Elvish sword", my first thought was that you were linking to the renowned theory that Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the process of getting a PhD.
It's so spot on I'm astonished. I actually was just arguing with a chemist over the existence of the word "substituent", and ended up dicking around in the OED, proving myself wrong, and then browsing for words for half an hour or so...
NL, I'm not sure why you astonished. The call of the OED is strong, and academics are very, very weak.