"Little" Sister
Chapter 6: Riding the Beast

Copyright© 2015 by PocketRocket

The next year at Yale should have been hell. I wanted to finish graduate school with the spring class. This required a heavy class load, on top of my dissertation. Fifteen grad hours is a lot. I took eighteen in the fall, then twenty-one in the spring. Fortunately, I arrived with a new draft of the thesis. This time, my adviser was a full Professor, Dr. Gupta. He used almost as much red ink as Madalyne. On the last page, he gave me a wink.

Dr. Gupta had specific ideas. As part of his process I had to digitize the work, so I hired a service to type it all in. Once that was done and checked, we worked on getting the footnotes in place. Through it all again, then again. Spell check. Grammar check. I noticed my speaking patterns came to match Dr. Gupta's hatred of contractions and adverbs. By Thanksgiving, I was feeling good. He told me to set it aside til after finals. Like Forest Gump and money, it was one less thing to worry about.

After my last final, we met in Dr. Gupta's office for tea. He had family in Sumatra, India. They would send him a quarter pound of local product every month, which is a lot of tea. One of our rituals was to use some of it. I still have the tea habit, when working on an article, a bill or an amendment. Speeches take coffee. That's just the way it is. Winter break took tea, coffee and No Doz, because Dr. Gupta wanted me to reduce the word count by a third.

I tried. God knows I tried.

Over the break, I managed to cut out about twenty percent of the verbiage. The problem was that every time I found something I could cut, I found some other thing that needed elaboration. It was two steps forward and one step back, til I wanted to scream. The day after New Year, I went to Dr. Gupta's office with my tail between my legs.

Dr. Gupta waved me to one of the good chairs and poured tea. He insisted on finishing one cup and beginning the second before discussing business. When he judged the time right, he asked, "How much did you add?" I must have looked shocked. Dr. Gupta smiled, indulgently I thought, and shook his head.

"Please. It was an exercise in re-examining your work. Removing text requires careful examination of the content. Like any good argument, there are things to add, elaborations to make. If it is only twenty pages longer, I am satisfied." This time, I know I looked shocked. He asked, "What?"

I said, "I managed to carve off almost twenty percent, about sixty-five pages. The big gains are in the notes." Dr. Gupta started laughing. Before long I joined him, even though he was a sneaky SOB.

He said, "Leave it here. I will get some third party readers to comment on it. If it is done as you have begun and progressed as you have described, you may be asked to defend it. For now, go. Do such things as young women do for entertainment. I do not wish to know. We will meet in one week."

It was not that easy. Yale does not hand out graduate degrees like candy. I had substantial revisions and editing still to do, but perhaps that was the point. At the beginning of my third graduate semester, I was already polishing my dissertation. This was a good thing, because my class load was a bear. Dr. Gupta told me to do what young women do for fun. Mostly I slept. In my spare time, I filled out applications for fellowships.

Sociology is not the best degree for job seeking. It was not that I needed to work. The family had plenty of money, so I could cultivate roses or something equally useless for the rest of my life. Sean was done with the Army and had become CEO of the family business. There was a guaranteed job if I needed one. As with many other things, I wanted to cut my own path.

The traditional avenues are law, consulting and teaching. I leaned to the latter. If I wanted one of the top teaching positions, even a Yale PhD would not be enough. Rather than go out in the world and make a mark, I chose to go into post graduate work. Yale and Harvard are names everyone knows, for good reason. That did not make them the best schools on Earth—alumni opinions to the contrary. Penn's Wharton business school, for example, often tops both Harvard and Yale in the annual rankings. Dartmouth was nearly as good in the social sciences and they needed a teaching Fellow. I made calls and filled out forms. In March, I drove up for an interview. If it is any indication, at 22 I was not the youngest PhD applicant.

 
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