Chaos and Cacophony from a Jumped-Up Country Boy

Friday, June 16, 2006

Ouch

Last August, as I embarked upon the second year of my thesis, I bumped into a fairly high-flying academic in the archive where we were both at work. He or she asked me what I was doing. I told her and was encouraged to 'keep up the good work'. This made Royston very happy, and he skipped off to tell all his friends.

I've just finished reading said academic's latest blockbuster. What is his/her last chapter, of roughly 100 pages, about?

a) The evolution of warts
b) A history of screaming (ten pounds to the lucky reader who guesses where this is stolen from)
c) Exactly what I told his/her I was doing last August

Ten months work down the drain. I'm screwed from a number of angles. Firstly, even if I go ahead with my research - I think I might be able to take a different approach with the material - my work, which is completely and unconditionally my own - it will look derivative. It might also be construed as plagiarism. Secondly, as this academic is a member of my department, I can't rip his/her findings to shreds because I won't be allowed to viva. Politics. Thirdly, if I go back to square one, I probably won't finish my thesis till approximately 2009.

I'm not the first person that this has happened to. I've heard horror stories of supervisors stealing entire research projects just as the student was about to publish. And I'm not even pissed off that I was beaten to it (although it is fairly gut-wrenching as the last 3 chapters are the only ones I've ever written that I'm proud of, and the last ten months have been prolific. Any budding academic reading this will now how bouts of industry might only actually come along once in a lifetime in this game) because that happens all the time too.

What does piss me off is that an established academic would willingly let me walk down a dark alley, that they would even encourage me to do so, while knowing that there was no way out. I've just wasted almost a year of my life because he/she hadn't the decency to steer me away from such a fruitless path.

Life sucks, doesn't it?