I started my PhD in 2018. I finished my coursework in 2021. After that, there was a sort of “floating” period where I published research and lived a mostly-normal life. Then, from 2024 until last Wednesday, there was the thesis.  Sitting here, as the newly minted Dr. Garrido, I feel I can offer some clarification on what the process is like, some mistakes, and why political savvy is at least as important as actual ability. 

1 – Languages I Speak
I started the PhD program through my friend Paul, who owned a jiujitsu gym I trained at. Paul had a side hustle teaching a class for elderly citizens and the community center but, due to his impending vacation in Texas, needed someone to cover. I agreed to be that guy and ended up making friends with the elderly citizens.

One of these gentlemen wished to prepare for his upcoming vacation to Canada. He wasn’t sure how to speak with Canadian strippers, Canadian strippers were the centerpiece of his upcoming travel plans, and a perceived lack of preparation troubled him. I offered to help out. He, evidently satisfied with the advice, mentioned to me that he had recently retired from a university in the central region of South Korea near my home. He said that, based on the contents of my class at the community center, I might be a good fit in a PhD program there. He further mentioned that there was a newly appointed, quite young professor at this central-South Korean university, and that I ought to become his first grad student. I agreed and, a few months later, began my studies under the supervision of “Professor J.” 

It was at this point I made my first decision that made the process significantly more difficult. This university, despite being quite large, had never had a student or faculty member from the Western hemisphere. They weren’t sure what to do, and offered to teach me separately, in English. I rejected this, and insisted I’d do the coursework in Korean like everyone else because I’m arrogant and stubborn. 

At the time, I was conversational in Korean and had even taught a few classes in Korean. I had thought this would be enough. I was mistaken. The homework load was heavy, the reading technical. My work schedule remained at about 40 hours a week, but the study load pushed this up another 40-50 hours. I took a grand total of two days off my first semester, and only three days the second semester.

This had health consequences, but it also shot my Korean skills up in a hurry. I started to have favorite books that aren’t available in English. Poetry started to make sense. Song lyrics opened up. But most important, this won brownie points with the faculty and my fellow students. Doing a PhD in a foreign language is without question harder, but I can’t say I regret it. 

2 – Languages I Don’t Speak
Modern Korean is written in a system called Hangeul, which is excellent. Hangeul not only gives the reader unambiguous and exact information for the pronunciation of every sound – the only irregular spelling in the entire language is the word for “sesame leaf” – but it also provides exact information as to the syllable structure of every word. For the benefit of beginners, the physical shapes of the letters also correlate to the shapes of the lips and tongue while making each letter’s sound. There are only 24 basic letters but they can be combined to form more than 2000 syllables. In my opinion, and the opinions of pretty much every linguist I know of, it is either the best writing system on earth or very close to it. 

One reason it is so effective is because it more or less had to be. The system it replaced – Idu – was so complicated and ponderous it caused the Koreans of the 15th century a crisis. Idu uses Chinese characters. Chinese characters are a lot like Egyptian hieroglyphs. There are thousands of characters which must be memorized and they are logically constructed to represent nouns, verbs, and adjectives. If you have a very simple grammar like Chinese, this isn’t a problem, and Chinese characters are legitimately a good way to represent Chinese languages. For an example of this grammatical simplicity, a typical Chinese sentence might go something like this: “(Past) I go store and buy vegetable.” There’s not really any past tense, no real verb conjugation, minimal conjunctions, and no honorifics.

But if you have a highly elaborate grammar like Korean, the difficulty of writing honorifics, tenses, etc, becomes profound. For example, the same sentence in Korean would translate as something like this: “I (subject marker) by means of vegetable-buying (gerund construction combined with transitive conjunction) store to went (honorific past tense).” Expressing all this elaborate grammar with Chinese characters is a nightmare. Further, non-Chinese derived words often cannot be phonetically expressed in Korean, so the Idu characters for native Korean words must be adapted or invented, thus increasing the bloat of characters.

It was so clumsy and awful it took people decades of study to master, and even then it was cursed with ambiguities and misunderstandings. Hangeul was the replacement for this system, and I cannot overstate how far superior it is. In the words of King Sejong, the boss-man who signed off on the creation of Hangeul …

“The sounds of our country’s language are different from those of China and are not confluent with the sounds of characters. Therefore, among the ignorant people, there have been many who, having something they want to put into words, have in the end been unable to express their feelings. I have been distressed because of this, and have newly designed twenty-eight letters (modern Korean has dropped four of the 15th century originals), which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease and make convenient for their daily use.”

Which brings me back to semesters three and four. My comfort level with classes in Korean had increased to the point that my original 40-50 hour per-week study load was down to about 15 to 20 hours. Things were looking good until semester three, when I took a class on the history of Korean education. It started its investigations in the 14th century. In the 14th century there was no Hanguel, only Idu. 

I had literally never studied Chinese characters until this point. The class was not going to slow down for me, and I refused to ask for special treatment because, as I said before, I’m an arrogant stubborn jerk who makes up for his lack of wisdom through sheer pain tolerance. In order to participate in the class, I needed to have intelligent things to say about King So-and-so’s official announcement chartering the glorious Ministry of Such-and-such in 1337, documents on the administrative structures of Confucian schools, and related topics. It was at this point I made another decision that made things harder. I rejected machine translation. Instead, I went to the local population of Chinese immigrants and found people who’d help me parse the Idu, character by character. Then I bribed them.

A great number of my new Chinese friends suddenly discovered they’d rather hang out with someone else around this time, but the strategy worked well enough. I started to get the general logic of the Chinese character systems and, layering that on top of my Korean language skills, was able to kind of sort of understand the texts. The whole thing was painful, and the study load shot back up to the 40-50 hour a week range, but I got through the class, and the class like it the next semester as well. 

 3 – Journal Publishing 
The research publication process can be quite opaque. Editors will not admit to their biases either in public or in their feedback,  official guidelines are rarely updated and full of lip-service, and the anonymity, while necessary, also makes it hard to get a read on the people involved. The easiest way to get around these challenges, and indeed the most common type of article you will find in most journals, is to pick something the journal has already published, align your positions to that article’s position, and then carve out some tiny addition that won’t offend anyone. My first attempt at getting published ignored this easiest process, and went straight for the jugular on several practices and theories I found lacking. I didn’t get published, which led to a dilemma.

The timid, carve out a tiny space and uncritically accept what’s already been published approach is, in my opinion, both intellectually dishonest and useless as research. On the other hand, I do understand the reluctance of these journals to accept bomb-tossing terrorism from a random newcomer. I adapted to this situation by finding the people I assumed to be editors of the journals in question, reading their research, and then building on it in ways they did not intend to make the points I actually cared about. 

For example, there was “Professor Y,” editor of a major journal, who wrote about how inequality causes bad effects on education in South Korea. My actual position on this issue is that the concept of “equality” is at least three things, that these three things are close to being mutually incompatible, and that two of the three possible equalities are really, really bad.  The compromise was to use “Professor Y” as the source for my background research – “equality is XYZ (Professor Y, 2018), inequality causes ABC problems (Professor Y, 2024) … ” – and then use his information to argue that at least part of the problem arises from conceptual problems in equality itself. This allowed me to make my point while being respectful to the journals. And it only took me two years to figure this out … partially.

4 – That One Dude I Seriously Pissed Off
It’s fashionable in my field to treat postmodernism and critical theory seriously. These styles of inquiry deny the possibility of accessing reality, dismisses truth claims as “dominant narratives and nothing more,” and insists that educating a student to be successful in a career is a sort of spiritual betrayal. I do not like this style of inquiry and, to be frank, think that it is a very sophisticated system for making oneself ineffective, lonely, and resentful. Put another way, if you were to perfectly invert every single thing a Buddhist or Stoic recommended for living a happy life, you’d get postmodern critical theory. 

There’s also a strange territorial thing going on in my field. Strangely, things originating in Asia shall not be polluted with things from the West, and things originating from the West shall not be polluted with things from Asia. I think this is because scholars operating on one side of the divide fear competition with scholars on the other, but also partially because there’s a weird, “rival embarrassments” thing going on. By that I mean, many East Asian scholars working on Western systems do so because they view native, East Asian systems as hideously outdated, irrelevant, and even barbaric. The East Asian scholars working on Eastern systems tend to think their colleagues in the pro-West camp are slavish and unpatriotic. Each is a little embarrassed by the other.

This would become quite irritating for someone like me who thinks both sides have a lot of good stuff, and can learn from each other. Regardless, I didn’t know about the division between Eastern scholarship and Western scholarship at the time I started publishing.

Shortly before turning my entire focus to the thesis, I tried to “clear out the backlog” by submitting a third research paper. In the review process, the auditors can judge a paper “accepted,” “accepted with revisions,” “reconsidered after revisions,” or “rejected.” If two of the three judges say “rejected,” you’re supposed to go elsewhere.

This was a problem because the results on my third, backlog paper were quite confusing. One reviewer asked for edits and a resubmit. Another bluntly said it was of no value, and do not resubmit. The third clicked a button saying “don’t resubmit” but wrote, in his/her notes, that “this paper has significant potential, and I encourage you to resubmit after making minor edits.” I assumed that it would be easier to accidentally click the “don’t resubmit” button than to accidentally write a bunch of encouraging feedback, so I did the minor edits requested by two of the three auditors, and resubmitted.    

The second round of feedback was where things got spicy. The guy who originally wanted me to edit and resubmit was happy and voted to accept. The guy who wrote “please resubmit” but clicked the button for “reject” was happy and voted to accept. But the guy who hated it the first time around still hated it, and now he was pissed. Roughly:

“Who the hell do you think you are, resubmitting such an obviously crap paper, when it had already been rejected by a majority of the committee? Do you think the journal is a joke, or that the auditors’ time doesn’t matter? Do NOT, under any circumstances, resubmit this piece of garbage. “

I can’t imagine his mood improved when he learned that the other two auditors had voted to accept the paper and that, as such, I was supposed to resubmit a second time.

Anyway, I submitted some final, small changes the two satisfied auditors requested. For the third round of feedback, the guy who was pissed announced that the other two auditors were no longer involved, that my changes were stupid, and that my paper had been rejected. His particular reasoning as to why my changes were stupid depended on a very specific belief involving the taboo on mixing eastern and western research in one paper I mentioned above. Foreshadowing … 

5 – The First Defense
The process for defending a thesis at my university has four steps. The first step is called a “plan presentation” and involves presenting the plan you have for your thesis to a group of professors and grad students, fielding questions, and gathering feedback. I sailed through this with no problems. The second step is called a “public presentation.” This is where you present the completed thesis to professors and grad students in an auditorium open to the public. I also sailed through this with no issues.

After this, there are two rounds of defense. The committee consists of 5 professors – my advisor, two experts in my subject who come from different universities, and two professors from my home university who are experts other subjects. The advisor is supposed to advocate for me, the two outside experts are supposed to make sure the paper meets the standards of my field, and the two professors from the home university are supposed to check on formatting, look for general logical errors, ensure that the structure is correct, etc. 

The first round of defense was an unmitigated disaster. Before I walked into the room, my advisor took me aside and said that the mood wasn’t great, and that I probably wasn’t going to pass. I was disappointed but, ultimately, still looking forward to meeting these outside scholars and getting real data on how to improve my research. Bad, vague, and contradictory feedback had been a prominent characteristic of the auditing process when I submitted to journals – I had no idea why they accepted the papers they did, no idea why they rejected the papers they did and I wanted to meet these folks in person to iron out any misunderstandings. 

Boy, was I about to be disappointed. The mood inside the room was palpably hostile the moment I stepped in. The male outside expert professor, we’ll call him Professor SH, was visibly pissed off. The female outside expert professor was visibly uncomfortable, and one of the two professors from within the university wasn’t much happier. I sat down and prepared for what I assumed would be questions. 

The “questioning” from Professor SH followed a weird pattern:
1. Ask question.
2. Allow me to answer for no more than one complete sentence.
3. Interrupt me and explain why both what I wrote and what I was saying amounted to naivete at best and stupidity in all likelihood. 

I grew up with several literal murderers in my social circles. My first long term job involved convincing the Bloods to stop robbing a convenience store. I have lived in places that regularly needed to patch up bullet holes. I cannot overemphasize how quickly Professor SH’s combination of hostility, condescension, and disrespect would have gotten him shot in these places. Related, literally no person has ever spoken to me in the way Professor SH did, and in any other context, I would have beaten the teeth out of his gums. 

Still, I had to pay attention to the context. I swallowed my pride and tried to focus on improving the paper. I moved the conversation as quickly as I could from the defense, which was hopeless, to collecting information for the next try. The feedback I got fell into three categories:
1. Useful formatting and structural advice.
2. A mysterious complaint about how the research wasn’t “necessary” from one of the non-expert professors.
3. A demand that I completely change the contents of my paper to focus on a critical-theory, postmodern scholar who Professor SH just happened to be investigating for the last several years but who had almost nothing to do with my original topic or emphasis. 

After the defense, tradition demands we go to a meal together. This is supposed to ensure we have a time for informal discussion, and to ensure we all part as friends. I was extremely not in the mood to be friends, but it’s easier to destroy an enemy when he thinks he’s safe, and I wanted Professor SH to feel safe. It was also at this point that I noticed how similar several of Professor SH’s verbal ticks were to the angry reviewer at the journal I mentioned before. I casually asked him a question about the Asia-European philosophical mixing problem that only the angry man from the journal would know the answer to. Professor SH answered without hesitation. Caught you, asshole.

6 – Fighting One on Three When You Have Almost no Power
After the “defense” I went home and collected my thoughts. I pointed out that Professor SH’s demands were extreme, contradicted the feedback given by literally everyone else, and that he was, without doubt, carrying a personal grudge. My advisor said I should try to do what he and the others asked regardless, and that I had misinterpreted Professor SH’s intent. 

This is possible, I should point out. While nobody had ever spoken to me the way SH had, it was not the first time I’d seen somebody in Korea speak to someone else in that manner. In fact, it reminded me of the ways competing factions had treated each other during the making of a nation-wide teacher’s exam a few years earlier. The truth is, professors sometimes do speak to each other the way SH had spoken to me. Of course, the missing context is that, during the making of that nation-wide teacher’s exam, 5 of the 8 professors involved had either fallen physically ill or suffered mental breakdowns due to the unspeakably toxic working conditions, so while SH’s behavior wasn’t technically unprecedented, it was at least horrible. 

Regardless, I decided to tack on several hundred pages of critical theory postmodern stuff. I spent almost 150 pages on the scholar Professor SH specializes in, even though said scholar has little to say about my area of research and literally nothing true to say. The result was a bloated mess of a paper that addressed each and every contradictory demand the committee had made. 

At this point I was disgusted enough that if this frankly stupid paper had satisfied the committee’s  judgment, I was going to publicly reject my degree and raise every single variety of hell I could come up with, including reaching out to my friends in media and the Ministry of Education.

Somehow, the results of this second try were even worse than the first. While Professor SH was happy I’d ruined the rest of the paper to focus on his irrelevant pet interest, literally everybody else wondered why on earth I would make the paper was so bloated and unfocused. My advisor decided that things were getting unfriendly, and tried to avoid the conflict by basically disappearing. The rare instances of communication basically boiled down to “you should fix version two by removing everything the committee asked for.” 

I should point out that I had almost no power. The committee held my academic life in their hands, and their judgment was absolute. My advisor controlled every procedural point. I could request a new committee, and I did, but my advisor denied it. I started to get advice from the committee members that maybe I should spend the next two years not talking to anyone and searching my heart for the vague and indefinable essence of “true improvement” – a nugget of advice I immediately rejected.

I said I had almost no power, but almost isn’t the same as “none.” First, the committee had no way to make me quit, which meant I could drag the process out as long as I wanted. Second, they had no way to stop me visiting whomever I pleased, which meant I could network around them. Third, they had betrayed, through their request for two years of quiet meditation, the fact that settling SH’s personal grudge over the journal paper was, perhaps, turning into a bit of a pain in the ass. Fourth, I discovered that my advisor, as the youngest and lowest status member of the committee, sure seemed like he was getting bullied, which meant I could profit by sabotaging the other committee members and/or building up my advisor. Fifth, if I was willing to throw away at least 18 months, I technically could change advisors, restart everything, and cause a massive headache for the entire department. 

It’s honestly quite sad this sort of thinking was even necessary. I honestly believe the committee and I could have worked everything out with one or two face-to-face meetings and a better system for communication. Unfortunately, and this was definitely my fault, my advisor had gotten the (entirely accurate) impression that I wanted to grind the committee members into dust in a protracted attritional battle. He’s not good with politics, and doesn’t like conflict, didn’t want to meet, and really, really didn’t want to meet with me and the committee all together. 

While I understand this and I should have done a better job disguising my hostility to SH in particular, I believe that a lack of meeting is fundamentally what had caused the mess to begin with. I had tried repeatedly to meet to practice the defense and check the contents of the thesis in the weeks and months before the defense, and my advisor had been unavailable. My attempts to communicate with the journals had been unsuccessful and left me unable to understand their demands or standards. My inability to speak to SH face to face had prevented us burying the hatchet with that stupid journal paper. My inability to access the “need for research” guy was causing all kinds of  confusion and fear. 

My plan to exploit the little power I retained took the following form:
1. Submit something new literally every weekend. Focus these updates on critiquing SH’s pet researcher, and asking how the committee would recommend my dealing with said pet researcher’s numerous mistakes and irrelevancies. This was designed to ensure the committee members never got to rest and to ensure the grudge-settling agenda extracted an ever higher toll on SH personally. Hopefully, it would also undermine whatever solidarity the other committee members felt for him by forcing them to constantly engage with his bullshit.
2. Scheduling face-to-face meetings with my advisor’s colleagues, the colleagues of the committee members, and the head of the department where I was studying. This was tricky to do. On one hand, I needed to very subtly imply that I was willing to change advisors, blow the whole thing to hell, and cause a massive headache to the entire department. On the other hand, I needed to make it clear that I preferred to remain loyal and that I was not motivated by any grudge of my own. I did this by explaining, in my meetings with all those colleagues, that I was simply looking for clarification on things that didn’t make sense to me, that I understood my advisor was busy and thus couldn’t meet me, and that I didn’t intend the meetings as a criticism of him personally. The fact those things were all true-ish enough to play helped significantly.
3. Gather intelligence from friends who had recently graduated out of my PhD program. 

To be frank, I’m proud of how this strategy turned out. Professor SH suddenly discovered that he had vague but serious ethical concerns which prevented him participating any farther and announced that, regretfully, he’d need to leave the committee. The other outside committee professor, whose feedback had been better than SH’s but still pretty crap, discovered similar ethical concerns, and got lost. 

The face-to-face meetings with colleagues and the department head clarified several technical points that had confused me for years, subtly implied that my advisor wasn’t doing enough advising, and made it clear that I would strongly prefer to remain loyal to him.  (I did accidentally offend a totally different professor in this process, but that was because I didn’t know about an ongoing scandal in his department!) I also got a much better picture of what the defense process was designed to do.   

Gathering intelligence primarily helped me to understand the “need for research guy.” Evidently, he went after literally all PhD students with this criticism, and I needed to have my own advisor prepared to defend my paper against him. Kind of a notorious committee member, in other words. 

6 – Truth and Reconciliation 
My advisor, one way or the other, heard from his colleagues that I was visiting the university and getting advice from his colleagues. This was technically loyal behavior that was nonetheless uncomfortable to have in public and caused him to reconsider his stance on meeting face-to-face. I scheduled a meeting for the next week.

He has a small child who is into puzzles, so I bought them a nice puzzle they could do together. I promised to not mention Professor SH, or any of the things that had happened with the first committee. I explained that I was not in a rush to finish the PhD, and that I wanted to write something I’d be proud of later. I also explained that I had struggled to write something “for the committee,” and asked if it was okay if I simply focused on writing something he, my advisor, would be personally proud to represent. He agreed. 

He asked me to be more flexible, and mentioned that I risked giving myself a reputation as both unmanageable and unresponsive to feedback if the grinding attritional battles continued. He mentioned one section of the thesis in particular that I’d fought to keep, and explained he thought my conflict with the previous committee members arose mostly because I was unreasonably wedded to this one particular section.

I promised I would be as flexible as possible, and suggested that a lot of my stubborn behavior was because I felt I was being asked to do contradictory things for reasons I couldn’t understand. I promised that everything in the paper was open to change, but that a clear set of standards and expectations would make it significantly easier for me. I emphasized that I was even open to including the part on Professor SH’s pet researcher, so long as my advisor was willing to explain the grand design. I promised to get rid of the one section my advisor had mentioned, and collaborated with him to create a new section that would serve the same function without causing unnecessary strife. 

He gave me a list of edits and tasks that amounted to a major re-write. I promised to demonstrate my determination and good will with an improved thesis matching his individual requirements. I spent the next 6 weeks working on the paper, and got a new version completed. My advisor looked it over, and was pleased with the changes. He pointed out some areas where I’d misunderstood instructions, and pointed out some other areas where my research had gone in unexpected directions. I met with him face-to-face again, and we hammered these details out. Another version of the paper followed, and I asked if it was something he would feel proud to represent. He said it was, and soon formed the second committee. He also smoothed out the situation with the scandal-ridden professor I mentioned earlier, for which I was very grateful.

7 – The Second Committee.
The second committee had several differences from the first. The outside professors were both unfamiliar to me, and I was unfamiliar to them, and thus it was unlikely any axes would need grinding. The chairman of the committee was someone I’d already consulted with (and had helped me engineer the reconciliation with my advisor), so I had a friend in that sense. The guy who thinks all research is unnecessary was back, but I had a plan. 

First, I looked up the articles published by the outside professors. Like I’d done before with the journal papers, I used their research as a foundation to talk about the stuff I’m actually interested in. One of the outside professors, for example, is a specialist in a scholar I fundamentally disagree with but who is nonetheless important for my topic. I used this professor’s research to describe and analyze that scholar I disagree with. Then I used the basis I got from my committee member’s research to describe why I was rejecting the scholar I disagree with. This was appreciated by the outside committee member.  The other outside professor was a specialist in a subject I could have included in my thesis, but had largely decided not to. After I found out he was on the committee, I put that material back in, something he appeared to appreciate. 

Second, I built a strategy for dealing with the “need for research guy.” I didn’t think I could break his pattern on my own, but reasoned that I had a chance if I could convince the other professors on the committee to gang up on him. I did this by intentionally writing an overblown, overly-detailed, and overly-long “need for research” section in my thesis. I wanted it to be conspicuously overdone because I wanted it to be the first thing the committee discussed during the defense. 

If the outside professors started the defense with something to the effect of “Mr. Garrido, the need for your research is obvious and we insist you cut the 15 pages where you go from the metaphysical justification of the study of history all the way through to the philosophy of science,” it would block the “need for research” guy from getting on his habitual soapbox and making his habitual case that no PhD thesis is ever necessary. 

Finally, I asked my advisor to look out for anything that might offend, affirmed that I was committed to our partnership regardless of how the defense went, and took a deep breath. 

8 – The Second Defense
Holy cow did this have a different vibe. The outside professors both smiled when I entered the room. I shook their hands and complimented their research, mentioning that I’d used both of their papers to improve my own. The chairman of the committee shook my hand as well, and asked how my trip had been. I thanked him for his attention and assistance. The “need for research” guy was literally looking at my need for research section and shaking his head, which made me laugh. 

The committee said that they considered the content of the thesis to be interesting and well-researched. Then, exactly to plan, they explained that the bloated need for research section was far too big, and that the need for my research was obvious. Clearly I would need to cut that down. (Need for research guy was flustered, and I successfully stopped myself from laughing.)

However, they felt I’d made a bad translation of one section originally written in German, and that the structural sequence of the paper needed to be reworked. A few theoretical points required clarification, and I’d screwed up some minor formatting points. They asked to reconvene the defense in three weeks, and asked that I finish my revisions within two weeks so everyone had time to look over the final version. 

At the traditional lunch afterwards, I thanked everyone for their hard work and excellent feedback, explained that I was excited to improve the paper, and expressed my hope that I could meet their expectations upon the reconvened defense. 

Returning home, I fundamentally re-organized the paper as they’d requested. This was a ton of work, and pretty tedious, but it’s amazing how much better the time passes when you are doing logically possible things for valid reasons. I also addressed the smaller points and cut down the need for research section, reorganizing it in order to placate the flustered need for research guy. I sent everything out on the deadline and crossed all my fingers and toes. 

The week of the reconvened meeting was absolutely insane. On Monday, I supervised the midterm exams for my students in Japan. As soon as they finished, I took a bus to the port and got on a boat to Korea. I arrived in Korea Tuesday morning and reached my university by around 1 pm. There my advisor contacted me to request emergency, last minute changes. I finished these changes around midnight. At about 5 minutes past midnight, my advisor contacted me again to say that I’d misunderstood the changes and that what I’d given him wouldn’t work. I clarified and finished the necessary part at 4:30 a.m. Wednesday morning.

At 7:30 Wednesday morning I woke up and went to the room where we’d have the defense. I bought everybody coffee and croissants (it’s a thing in Korea), set up the tables, and waited for the committee members to arrive. When they did, my advisor asked me to leave the room so they could enjoy their coffee in croissants in peace, discuss their final thoughts on my thesis, and prepare the details of the verdict they wanted to present to me. I duly obeyed. 

I thought I would be nervous waiting for their decision. Years and years of effort had gone into this thesis, this PhD. If they rejected me, there was going to be at least another 6 months of 7 day work weeks, health consequences, and generally pulling my hair out. Theoretically I should have been wetting myself but, far from panicking, I simply sat down and occupied myself playing solitaire. Part of this was exhaustion, I’m certain, but part of it was also kind of zen. It was out of my hands, I had tried my best, things would end how they end regardless of how much I fretted. 

My advisor called me back into the room. I duly obey once more, taking my seat at the head of the table. The committee members went one by one explaining the weaknesses they still saw in the paper. I was allowed to question them each in turn, an opportunity I used to clarify their concerns. This took about one hour. At the end, the chairman of the committee summarized, in painfully specific detail, what everyone had said. Then, he intentionally drew out his verdict. 

“Well, our committee is concerned about section ABC, and some of us are concerned about XYZ though not all, and section QRS might be more interesting if it included perspectives from Professor EFG at LMN University … ”

Long, solemn look across the table to ensure I understand the gravity of the moment. I nod solemnly and he returns to his speech.

“So, in sum, we have decided, after much deliberation, that, according to the standards of our institutions and the traditions of our …”

At this point I’m thinking in my head please no more subordinate clauses!

“… colleagues that you, Dr. Garrido, have earned your PhD.”

I may have gotten a little overexcited. Or at least, that is the best explanation I have for the fact that I thought it appropriate to hug the members of the committee, and that I was squeezing hard enough to hear their distinguished, professorial spines popping from within my grasp. 

My gratitude to both my advisor and those committee members cannot be overstated. The next time my wife and I visit Korea, we’re going to swing by each of their offices and deliver gifts. What a journey.