Master of Ceremonies

Academic Paper Writing? What's that?

The school has a "research day" each year. The department was so woeful in producing useful research that they either faked it and brought back the same crappy thing each year, or they forced each MPhil student to show off his research. They didn't care if the student was prepared to show his research or not. 

My idiot official supervisor, upon seeing my work for the first time in months, pretended that he had been working closely with me. I said nothing, and merely showed the passing public what was done, why it was done, and how to work the system I built!

The one supervisor, that was keen on causing his student to finish the MPhil in a two-year period, was a squat chubby little Indian guy. He literally came from India. In Jamaica, I have to make that distinction, as a large part of our society is of mixed Indian heritage. 

The Indian Guy was busily getting his student's work published, introducing him to the concept of presenting his papers in foreign countries (such as South Korea), and was making a big deal out of it. When I asked my idiotic supervisor about that, he merely shrugged it off, and coolly said, "Don't worry about those things."

It should be noted that when my official supervisor told me to not worry about something, that was when I truly started to worry. This is because I had come to believe that he was a jackass hellbent on wasting my time.

The English Guy and I spent three months working on my first paper. The English Guy was adamant that it was a good thing to do because if accepted, I would be able to ask departmental support to travel to faraway lands! The worst case scenario would be my constructing my thesis quickly. Because of him, my future self is able to write and present academic papers at other conferences.

My official supervisor somehow became aware I was writing a paper. Maybe I was walking around and bragging too much. Upon the paper's completion, he wanted to read it to make corrections. His "corrections" included adding an image here or there, or moving a sentence. Nothing more. That was it! A full five minutes worth of work.

I submitted my paper to a conference and waited for approximately three months for the conference to respond. They turned it down, but thanked me for my interest, and highlighted how I could improve it. When the idiot official supervisor heard, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, "Don't worry about that," as he nonchalantly walked away.

The English Guy was adamant that the information in the paper was good enough to be published. He encouraged me to not give up. "Look for other conferences", he said.

I happened to notice a conference in The Netherlands that seemed right up my alley. They wanted to see advanced prototypes, and my system was exactly that! I informed the English Guy, and he told me to give it a shot. I applied the comments provided by the previous conference and lengthened my paper by two pages. That was a huge jump in size! I was able to add information that I couldn't have put previously due to the failed conference's paper length restrictions.