The PhD Is Done

Before I knew it, the day of my dissertation defense had arrived.

I had lived in this city for six and a half years. Looking through my phone, I discovered that I had hardly any photographs of it. Perhaps the longer you live somewhere, the more ordinary it begins to feel.

So here are a few photographs from earlier years.

A tree on North Campus. Absolutely beautiful.

The wildlife I regularly encountered by the roadside.

And then there were the little squirrels that seemed to be everywhere around my apartment complex. Ann Arbor squirrels were ridiculously fat. After I moved to California, every squirrel there looked half-starved by comparison.

The two in these photographs were not even particularly impressive. Go to Central Campus and see someone carrying a mountain-sized bag of nuts to feed the squirrels, and then you will understand what a truly fat squirrel looks like.

The weather around town could change in an instant. It took only three hours to go from green grass to a blanket of snow—and I could photograph the entire transformation without leaving home.

And that was it. I could not find any more photographs.

Back to the defense. It went smoothly. I already had papers in top conferences, so I wasn’t particularly worried about graduating.

After the defense, my committee had a short meeting. About twenty minutes later, my advisor came out and told me there were still a few things in the dissertation that could be polished, but after discussing it, they decided there was nothing that really needed to be changed. So they left it at that.

And I passed.

Many thanks to my advisor for making it so easy on me at the finish line.

A week later came the retirement ceremony for a senior professor who had taught at the university for 34 years. He had also served on my dissertation committee. He was the head coach of our ICPC team, and I had known him since I first arrived at the university. In my first semester, I took one of his courses, absolutely crushed all three exams, finished at the top of the class, and earned an A+. I suppose we made quite an impression on each other after that. He and my advisor had been friends for decades.

The ceremony needed a student representative to give a speech, and they chose me.

My advisor was representing the faculty and spoke first. After finishing his own remarks, he needed a way to introduce me. He said, “This student will be speaking in a moment. He defended his dissertation a few days ago. Fortunately, he passed, or I have no idea what he would be saying today.”

The jokes never stopped coming. Thanks for that. They had only asked me to give the speech a few days earlier; if I had failed my defense, I probably would not have accepted the job.

Then I went up and spoke. It was a great success—perhaps more successful than my dissertation defense. I did not use a script, so the delivery felt natural. I turned stories from the previous six years into a ten-minute comedy routine, and it went over extremely well. Several professors came after me with compliments and told me I had a talent for comedy. All those years of watching the Chinese comedy roast show Roast! (《吐槽大会》) had finally paid off.

When I first arrived in the United States, about all I could manage at a burger place was “Number One.” As soon as the cashier asked a follow-up question, I was completely lost. And now, somehow, I could do a comedy routine in English. Perhaps academics were not the only thing that had improved over those years.

Until we meet again, Ann Arbor.