You hate the professor? Hit his student (Part 2: The revenge)
[Translation from the Greek original]
In Part 1, I mentioned some bitter memories that bring tears. I hope Part 2 will bring laughter.
First off, I note that many of our students’ theses and other projects are of high research quality, as evidenced by the fact that they have been the basis for the production of many publications in scientific journals and conferences. Many more could have been produced, but often students are not very interested or get busy right after graduation and do not have time to work on them. Sometimes they return years later and do the additional work required to get their work condensed and reformulated in a way that is publishable in an international journal. Often the publication process can involve continual modifications depending on the reviews received, and this can even take years.
I think the record for the number of publications of a university thesis conducted in a six-month-long period is held by this postgraduate thesis of Nikos Malamos (2000): Methodology development for spatial interpolation of hydrometeorological variables using broken line smoothing techniques. It was carried out during one academic semester for the interdepartmental Master's programme in Water Resources Science and Technology. It produced three scientific papers that were published several years later—for the reasons I have explained above.
In addition, the method developed in this thesis was used operationally in various applications. Most recently, it was used in 2023 for the production of ombrian curves for the total geographical area of Greece (a work that has also been published in three scientific articles).
But let us now come to the examination of the postgraduate thesis of Nikos Malamos, which is our subject. When the examination committee was appointed, Nikos visited the other two members for any comments. He understood that he would be attacked in the examination, which was obvious to me, since I was supervising the thesis and I was at that time at a low rank (assistant professor).
He laid out a defence plan that he didn't tell me about. He simply asked me if I trusted him to handle the matter without my interference. “Of course”, I replied, “it's your job, and any interference from me would make things worse”. We agreed, and I was pleased that he himself asked for my non-interference.
On the day of the examination, a (female) professor, member of the examining committee, had come with the graduate thesis stuffed with yellow sticky notes on infinite pages and started the Inquisition like this: “On page 3 I told you that you had to report on such and such a problem, and in the revised edition I don't see that you have done so."
Nikos replies, “Perhaps you didn't see that at the end of the thesis I added the following sentence that covers the issue you raised”. And he reads the sentence:
Through this investigation and on the basis of comparisons with other methods it will be possible to systematically test the limitations, advantages and disadvantages of the proposed methodology.
The professor continues like this: “On page 5, I told you to change this and I don't see that you did”.
Nikos replies, “Indeed, but I dealt with it as follows. At the end of the thesis I added the following sentence, which covers the point you raised”. And he rereads the same sentence.
The examiner continued in the same pattern. On page 9, on page 23, and so on. Nikos, unperturbed and calm, was giving exactly the same answer. After many repetitions, the professor started shouting that everything she said hadn’t been considered, that her role was cancelled, and so on.
Immediately afterwards, Nikos explained to me that this was exactly the defence plan he had thought of and decided on. He told me that this was exactly the reaction he had expected. He also told me that he thought that after this reaction, that professor would give him grade 8, I would give him a 10 (the maximum) and the third member of the committee would give him a 9. He was going to get an average of 9 and completely disregarded that he wouldn’t get the 10 he deserved.
Everything happened exactly as he predicted.