I’ve been beguiled. Oh, how romantic I imagined my thesis to be. A long engagement and ending with a massive party. In reality? Simply a quick and dirty pregnancy. Maybe a shotgun wedding if I’m lucky. A mere three-month gestation period for my ‘magnum opus’. Wham bam, thank you ma’am!
But what really proved the wizard to be a fake was the little pickle that sent me spiralling through the five stages of grief: denial (Maybe my supervisor will miraculously recover from their medical issues), anger (How dare MY TOPIC get thrown out?), bargaining (If I just rewrite my proposal ten different ways, surely someone will let me do it?), depression (crying in the library and somehow still achieving new personal lows), and finally, acceptance (Fine. I’ll do some random research on the migration patterns of pigeons or whatever – is what I would have said if I had actually reached acceptance).
‘Supervisor? More like subpar visor!’ I laugh hysterically before realising no one else finds that funny. And in my bitterness, I looked to other people, as one does, for a little game of compare and contrast. I noticed a peculiarly unbothered brand of students – the ones who picked a thesis topic like they’re playing Russian roulette. They eeny, meeny, miny, moed their way into their research topics and shocker – they are far less stressed.
Academia values compliance, adaptability, and an ability to churn out work with the emotional detachment of a tax auditor
While I was envisioning a grand love affair, they expected nothing more than a summer fling. And now? I am left destitute and disillusioned while they, completely unfazed, would have just picked a different topic from the vending machine.
The system is an oil rig, and it rewards the well-oiled machine. Efficiency wins over passion every single time. Academia does not value deep, obsessive intellectual love affairs – it values compliance, adaptability, and an ability to churn out work with the emotional detachment of a tax auditor. Love definitely isn’t the best survival tactic – it’s treating your thesis like a tax return form. Fill in the boxes, check the right codes, submit it on time, and Bob’s your uncle.
But here’s the problem: just like real oil rigs, this system is not built for sustainability. The vending machine topics are a fleeting and finite resource. The creative mind is a renewable energy, maybe less efficient and the grid is not compatible, but the well is bottomless. And yet, academia keeps drilling for oil. And so, the stoic academic is the creative’s enemy.
So, what now? Do we rebuild a system that rewards visionaries instead of efficiency? Do we make space for the students who weep over a lost research proposal, who obsess? Maybe we should let curiosity kill a few cats. Schrödinger certainly experimented with a cat or two, and that turned out just fine – depending on which way you look at it.
CARLA ERASMUS