show transcript
etchif posts:
I think when you apply to be the guy that designs university websites you have to verify that you have never studied web design
arahir replies:
wait okay wait here’s a story about how STAY WITH ME to format your thesis at my college. STAY WITH ME. please stay with me. stay with me.
so you finish your thesis which you thought was stressful. now you have to make sure it is FORMATTED correctly which is easy. where are the instructions for how to format it correctly? so glad you asked! they are stored in the INFORMATION portion of an assignment in a closed canvas course you were asked to complete the year before. the course is not available during formatting so you just have to have a friend who copy and pasted the entire canvas course into a pdf! got that? done? great! go format your thesis!
STAY WITH ME.
now that’s out of the way you just need to PROVE it’s formatted correctly by having someone official check it. when? well you make an appointment of course. now? no you have to make it starting at 9am two weeks before finals. everyone at the college will try to register to do this at the same time so you’re advised to set an alarm and make your appointment as close to 9am that day as possible. alarm all set? great let’s go!
STAY WITH ME.
it’s 9am on the chosen day. now this is not for your formatting. this is for SCHEDULING an APPOINTMENT for someone to check your formatting. you have the link ready, right? to take you to the scheduling? get ready.
having clicked the link, you have to follow these instructions as fast as possible at the same time every other graduate student is trying to do the same thing. your ability to graduate on time hinges on this. not all will be successful. are these instructions written anywhere? no, so hold on to your hat and:
click the link and log in
verify yourself
wait for the page to load
you are now staring at what looks like a bank website from 2005. there are options for employee resources and nothing else but that’s okay
go to “switch page view” in the top corner of the nightmare you are looking at and switch from teacher to student
don’t read or touch anything.
expand the sidebar and click INFORMATION
scroll three pages down - don’t read anything - until you get to the blue “need help?” link and click that
go to the blank drop down menu that has appeared
scroll down 78 options past sections like "registrar"and “billing” until you get to the “graduate aid” section.
scroll past the option that say thesis advising you dumb bitch.
select the alluring and enigmatic “CULMINATING EXPERIENCE” instead.
a new drop down menu appears. this time there are only three options. unfortunately one is advising, one is graduation, and one is “T/D/P”
guess which one you need. advising? no. what, you didn’t know it was called T/D/P? 🫵😂
“search times” will appear but don’t do that. it breaks the page if you do that. click on the little calendar instead and select a day.
you can now make an appointment to have your formatting checked. please note this is not the same as formatting your thesis, submitting it, or having it approved.
thank you for staying with me
arahir:
[an image of tumblr tags reading: “wait what does T/D/P stand for?”]
it stands for “thesis / dissertation / project” as we all know, of course.
[end of transcript]
So glad I study CS and our teachers are just “here’s a LaTeX template for the thesis, it will do the formatting for you”. You can always use word and follow the formatting guidelines yourself, but that would be stupid
even in cs i have heard tales of people made to take coding exams on paper. i can only hope they weren’t using some verbose language
As long as they’re lenient on syntax and spelling mistakes the writing isn’t so bad, the worst part is not being able to test it at all.
Me using whitespace:
Ah, that’s true, I had some, but they are usually lenient on syntax. The worst offender was the OOP professor that wanted a full (kinda) Java program written on paper. During COVID he switched to allowing IDEs so it could be done online and turned in easily, and since then it’s always been an online exam
This is absolutely outrageous. I wish this was all false, but I’ve experienced first hand how incredibly horrendous university websites can be. And I’m pretty sure that’s an international experience.
1000 upvotes for this. Academia is so fucking stupid. And people pay big money to be abused by these institutions.
I’ve seen firsthand how a school district’s website gets built and let me tell you, the website designer fights tooth and nail to design a usable website. Everyone else fights them to create trash. That university’s process is probably like that because the designer gave up and let the professors design their own shit and that’s the way they wanted it.
I wish this was unbelievable
My university’s websites are actually OK.
The worst part is by far the fragmentation, where it’s sometimes easier to use a search engine if you’re looking for something specific.
My school gave up on printing/binding theses, so they also gave up on thesis formatting requirements. As long as your advisor approved the thesis and the title page had all the relevant info, it could be formatted however you wanted.
After finishing my dissertation, I spent maybe 20 minutes emailing the library staff about dissertation edits (date format/placement on title page mainly) and otherwise was told any other requested changes were optional so long as my advisor signed off. I have to get my dissertation printed and bound myself, but that is a small price to pay compared to the nightmare that is univeristy thesis format compliance.
Don’t you have a student council in America you can complain to about such stuff? From my experience studying in Germany (and even more so in Austria) the student council (oder student union) has very good connections to the administrative and scientific staff to pass feedback along and also get invited to (mandatory for the Uni) semesterly quality-assessment-circles to assess the “studibility” of the program, which also includes evaluating such processes.
I must have lucked out by graduating in the summer (and having a more straightforward process to get my thesis formatting checked)
If you’re looking at this situation in a couple years, consider student organizing to change it
Smells like SAP
enlightening insight
woa you can’t say that about the Irish man
So glad I was done with school before I had to deal with any sort of online submissions. Might not have been the case had I finished grad skool, though, so that’s a dodged bullet.
