She Found Her Master's Degree In A Trash Can

[Divine Discontent]

This is a fabulous story of not giving up!
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When Linda Cerniglia went back to school, it took her almost seven years to get through all the prerequisites, the labs, the research. And it took a thief just moments to grab her purse, with the only copy of her master's thesis stored on a tiny jump drive inside.

For anyone who's ever obsessed about a project but forgotten to back up the data, watched a computer screen fizzle just before a deadline or left crucial documents in a cab -- here is a story about backing up, and moving forward.

Grad school never came easily to Cerniglia, who majored in dance as part of the University of Maryland's Class of 1986, became a personal trainer and returned to the school in her forties for a master's degree in exercise physiology. She designed an experiment, analyzed CT scans, ran statistics, studied research and -- slowly -- began to write her thesis.

"It was so painful," she said. "I would rather go outside and dig a hole all day long than write."

She tried to trick herself into working on it, by going to a coffee shop or finding a sunny picnic table in the park. She could use a computer anywhere, because she had all the research on a jump drive, a tiny, portable memory-storage device about the size of a cigarette lighter.

<snip>


She Found Her Master's Degree In A Trash Can
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10551825/



:hi:
www.cafepress.com/dontspyonme
www.cafepress.com/dontmakemedoit

[LynzM]

1. Day-um.

Absurd of her not to have that work backed up at least two places, but I'm glad she got it back, in the end.

[Lisa]

2. the horror! the horror!

As a former grad student, I can relate ...

It's interesting how many people have had serious setbacks in their work. (Really, it's just as much about endurance and patience, as about being smart!) I was helping one colleague collate her dissertation late last night, and I confess that I broke up laughing when I happened to see this sentence in her Methods section: "One of the dataloggers had been smashed during the night -- judging by the tracks, we presumed it was by an elephant."

[Divine Discontent]

3. Ha! I couldn't imagine this happening to me, what an ODD but happy story

[HereSince1628]

6. Oh God! I'd love to see such a thing while trudging thru awful writing

flawed arguments, and violations of the Graduate School's Thesis Clerk's standards.

Hell, I might even let a student get thru an oral without a question if I got to read that out loud at the defense!

[Lisa]

13. actually, the writing was fairly good ...

Not as turgid as some other papers I've read (remote sensing and image interpretation can get surprisingly murky at times!). The fact it was a field project rather than a lab study did liven things up. (Another PhD candidate was working on public involvement in resource management, and decided to preface each section of her dissertation with quotes from her field notes ... these provoked more discussion at her defense than the actual material ... my favorite being the respondent who insisted on picking through his dog's hair for ticks, during the interview.)

The paper I'm really looking forward to is by one of our MSc students who was underwater, doing a reef ecosystem study, when the tsunami swept over her towards the coast of Thailand. She and the rest of the team felt what they thought a brief surge in the water, and in fact had kept on working. When they surfaced, the dive boat was gone. (It had been carried inland by the wave.) Luckily they were rescued the next day, before they ran out of drinking water.


p.s. on the way home yesterday, I was thinking that it might be fun to compile a book of "thesis horror stories". I'm sure there are a lot out there! I had been remembering the claim by friends at Berkeley that at least 2 people at the university had lost all or part of their major papers during the fires ... they'd walked out of their houses in the morning, and returned to charred ruins.

[Matariki]

4. i have a very similar story

i met a friend of mine at a cafe in Seattle where she had been working on her Master's thesis on her laptop. It was close to completion and also NOT backed up. We went to a nearby park to sit on the swings and got mugged by about 7 teens. Well, not actually mugged - I think my friend would rather have died than lose her thesis. She punched one of the kid in the face and we walked quickly out of the park, where fortunately and coincidently a cop was driving by. She consequently backed up her thesis.

[yellowcanine]

5. I am trying to figure this out. Who would not at least have a copy on the

hard drive of the computer you are using to edit the document? You would almost have to try to keep it only on the memory stick. And if one is working on a Word document on a computer isn't there automatically a back up copy made every so often on the hard drive? I can see that she would have lost the most recent edits but it is hard to believe there isn't a copy of the bulk of the thesis on the hard drive. I am not a computer geek so I could be wrong.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. No the backup would be on the file you

saved to, not the HD.

Me I have backups of my work on multiple places, the HD on the laptop, the HD on the puter and in some cases, my Hand Held device. Did I mention the thumb drive?


I am also terrible in the sense that I have them back ups in at least two file formats as well

[LunaSea]

9. speaking of thumb drives...

check this out-
http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-usb-drives-ever/

[yellowcanine]

14. Yeah those "food" thumb drives are funny now until somebody throws one

and someone loses an eye. Who will be laughing then?:silly:

[yellowcanine]

10. Ok but I still think it is weird she didn't at least have some version of

the thesis on a HD somewhere. From a practical point of view, suppose she left the memory stick at home some day - she couldn't work on her thesis that day or unless she dashed home to get it? I guess I am the only one who pulls the memory stick out of the slot, lays it on the desk and walks off without it, only to have an "oh shit" moment when I get to my destination?

[NJCher]

15. not only that, but...

Saving to a computer HD is usually faster. There are other considerations, too, that have to do with the overall structure of the project, associated files, bookmarks, etc.

Although I'm happy for this woman, I've got to think she doesn't have much in the line of organizational skills. Keeping something that important on a portable drive like that just isn't the way to handle the massive project that is the graduate thesis.

Whatever her organizational skills, however, she can say she thinks like a thief and that is no small matter in a country that's headed up by them.




Cher

[grytpype]

8. I like a story with a happy ending once in awhile!

[Democrat 4 Ever]

11. During my course work I routinely email copies of my work to

two different email accounts. Besides always having an electronic copy of my work available as insurance I could always go online to edit, polish or review work no matter where I was as long as a computer with internet access was available. Saved my butt a couple of times. Computers crash, disks, CDs and external drives get lost, but two separate email services crash at the same time? Not likely.

Besides, I want to make it as easy as possible for Agent Mike and Chimpy to review my work to save the world from "terraists."

[The_Mule]

12. Boring personal story time.

When I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation (way before the days of thumb drives) my computer was zapped by a massive power surge and went down in flames (okay, smoke). I had no money for a new computer, and was spending the summer saving money staying with my parents away from my school. So, I ended up sneaking in to the small computer lab at the local community college whenever I could. Unfortunately, the computer lab used a different word processor (before the days of ubiquitous MS Word), so I had to retype everything from hard copy.

I've never fully recovered.
:crazy:

[Divine Discontent]

I made it through...

that boring personal story! lol.. seriously, that's not THAT boring. Come watch me for an evening. hahaha. I wrote an english final essay and thought that was the hardest thing to do, and it was only 12 pages (I received an A+), but doing that at my age was a large task, I cannot imagine a THESIS paper.

[Divine Discontent]

16. ps ---

Everyone should get a chance to read this in the greatest page (NOMINATE PLEASE). It kept me glued to the screen til I finished reading it. Stories of this nature usually don't do that. It's very well written, and has a happy ending!

Merry Christmas everyone!

[C_eh_N_eh_D_eh]

17. I've got a story like that.

Not me personally, but a guy my dad went to school with. This would be at Saskatchewan U, around 1970.

Our hero (if Dad ever told me his name, I don't remember it) had spent months of gruelling work on his senior project. For those who don't know what programs in punched-card form look like, I refer you to the Simpsons episode where Apu gets his citizenship. That entire gag is 100% accurate. There was also a lot of testing and re-writing involved, since a single mispunch could and would futz up your entire program. The whole process is more frustrating than writing hexadecimal processor instructions without a reference book.

Aaanyway, shortly before the submission date, this poor beleagured nerd had finally finished his project, and had the cards boxed up and ready to hand in. He then left campus to spend a few days with his parents or girlfriend or something. While he was gone, his landlady decided to do something for him on account of him being so burned out. So, for a nice surprise, she cleaned his room.

Now, keep in mind here, we're talking about a sweet little old lady who never had much of an education, and who certainly didn't know the first thing about computers. There was no way on Earth she could have been expected to know what the unmarked box full of little cardboard rectangles was. It certainly didn't *look* like anything important. And no reasonable jury could possibly find fault with her chucking box, cards and all into the incinerator.

The poor bastard ended up staying on an extra semester.

[hunter]

18. Man, I'm old.

I remember writing programs on punched cards. Computer time was less expensive if you ran your programs overnight so as poor students we'd all leave our stacks of punchcards on the shelf and come back for the results in the morning.

Usually there'd be some "Dohhhhhhh!" smack yourself in the head kind of mistake in your code that caused it to fail, so you'd fix that, and repeat the process.

Every so often they'd leave the lab open overnight for all those poor schmucks who couldn't write working code or type.

I left some boxes of my favorite FORTRAN programs at my parent's house because I didn't have room for them, but then my dad got tired of hauling my old crap around, so he recycled them.

Since I've had internet access, I keep copies of important stuff in several formats, and on remote servers.

[Lisa]

20. I'm old too ...

Our high school computer was a PDP-11 that used punch cards. My lab partner wrote a program that took up an entire box of the things, and was carrying it down the hall to feed into the beast when he tripped and dropped the box. Luckily he had remembered to number the cards, but it still took half an hour to get the stack picked up and re-organized.

Later we switched to a "more advanced" format which stored the code on cassette tapes (!).

[LynzM]

19. Oh my god....

I cannot imagine the defeat one feels realizing that something like that is gone.... :cry: