Dissertation Disquisition

ours looked like this one

Our daughter-in-law, Melissa, is nearing the end of her Ph.D. quest at Kent State, reaching that glorious stage of ... dissertation! We were talking about it with her and our son, Steve, the other day, and it brought back some ... memories (that's the kindest word I can think of).

It was the early 1970s. Joyce and I were both nearing the end of our doctoral coursework requirements when our son decided it was time to arrive, July 16, 1972. I was in summer session at the time and had to take L's (Lates--not lattes, of which I'd never heard at the time) in my courses. I was needed ... elsewhere.

Oh, how the arrival of a baby changes things! (I should add a "duh" here--for this is something all parents since Adam and Eve have known.) Suddenly, overnight, sleep becomes nothing but a wisp of a memory; a human being only days old absolutely confounds you (well ... me); and you no longer decide things like this: Hey, why don't we go to a movie after supper? Hah!

Anyway--with the help of Joyce's nearby relatives and of my mom (who flew out for a few days of disaster relief) Joyce and I finally began to function again. I completed my courses and began the research on my dissertation (as did Joyce).

Let's not talk about the research differences between then and now, okay? Google was not even a word then. Nor Internet. Nor iPad. Nor smart phone. Nor ... you know. Instead, it was paging through volumes of Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, finding the articles you needed, seeing if your library had them, ordering via inter-library loan the ones it did not, etc.

Enough of that! I'm breaking out in hives as I type ...

But it is the writing of the dissertations I want to say a few words about. Because personal computers lay in a future we could not even imagine, both Joyce and I wrote our first drafts longhand. Pencil and pen. (No, not quill!)

Then ... we typed those drafts. We owned one IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter in those days (see picture above), so we had to share. Whenever I was home all day (weekends, vacations--I was teaching full-time in Aurora, Ohio), Joyce and I would divide the day: She took Steve in the morning; I took the IBM. In the afternoon, we reversed. And I have to say I made out like a bandit on this deal because Steve liked a lengthy afternoon nap ... As I think about this, I realize I was something of a Male Jerk at the time.

Anyway, I typed and hand-revised three drafts of my dissertation (400+ pages), then, for the final draft, I was so sick of the whole thing that I hired the wife of a teaching colleague to do it. I'm sure she, too, was sick of it after about twenty minutes because not only did she have to contend with what I'll kindly call my "dissertation prose," but she had to be flawless. This was the copy that I would have bound and placed where I hoped to High Heaven no one would ever find one.

Joyce was going through the same process, and we both finished and passed our defenses in the winter of 1977-78, and we went through the graduation ceremony together in the spring of '78. One of my fond memories in that ceremony? When they read my name, I heard from the audience a whooping approval from a voice I knew: John Mlinek, who had been among my first group of seventh graders in the fall of 1966 at the Aurora Middle School. He was graduating from KSU that same day. And we are now FB friends and have been in touch ever since the mid-1960s.

So ... as we all know ... researching/writing/editing/revising are all much quicker now than they were Back in the Day. But you still have to write the Damn Thing, you know?

And so I wish Melissa the best of fortune as she begins her sojourn in Dissertation Land.