No One Should Care What Kate Turabian Thought About Style

I have recently had to write and turn in my dissertation.  To do this, I had to adhere, at least somewhat, to the stylistic whims of Kate Turabian.  Which has been a painful process.

Who is Kate Turabian?  She is a former bureaucratic pencil-pusher who leveraged her tiny bit of control over dissertation layout into a world-wide empire enforcing her anal-retentiveness about margin widths and heading formats through a book she wrote explaining how she liked things to be.  Because she had to approve dissertations at the University of Chicago, students had to do whatever she said to graduate.  She herself never even finished college, and never wrote a dissertation.  She certainly never wrote a college term paper using her made-up style.  She just made others follow it.  Margins on the left should be 1.25" while the right 1"?  Appendix titles are only 1" from the top margin, but chapters 2"?  It doesn't matter if it makes sense, you just have to do it, or you can't get your PhD.  

And that's all her wikipedia page should say about her.

Twelve Years a Grad Student

I drew this on a white board at my 
last school, in 2013.  Nine years later
and I slayed the dragon.

I recently finished my PhD in physics.  My particular field is astrophysics, and my thesis topic was on Newtonian and relativistic white dwarf asteroseismology.  All I have left to do is get past the whims of Kate Turabian, whose opinion on formatting people for whatever reason care about.  

The first post on this blog was almost ten years ago, while I was a grad student.  Inspired by some of my classes and books I was reading, I had some crazy ideas mixing science and fiction and wanted to post them somewhere.  The most famous of those crazy ideas was about the Berenst#in Bears, which is now a meme far beyond my mere tiny blog.

Ten years ago I was a graduate student.  One week ago, I was a graduate student.  In fact, I started graduate school in 2010, meaning I have been pursuing a PhD for for twelve years (eleven not counting my year teaching high school).  

I have been twelve years a grad student.

I figured, given the momentousness of the situation, I would reflect on this overlong time.