Digital Wanderer

I defended my thesis today. For some reason, I don't feel the awakening of divinity promised by my dad.
The grade is an 8 out of 10. That's roughly a 5 on the Russian scale. A 9 is a 5+, a 10 is a result with special distinction.
But overall I became a willing victim of glamour and discourse.

   Glamour — because they lowered my grade to an 8 due to a botched presentation. A presentation in Latvian, which I know rather poorly. I couldn't memorize it word-for-word, and I didn't have time to finish learning it anyway, I have a job after all. Plus I have no public speaking experience, and it shows.
  And as for discourse  — I'll have to explain that in detail and a bit harshly. First, the committee didn't understand most of what was being discussed. They simply lacked the knowledge — there isn't a single relatively young person on the committee. And that's one of the reasons why no one on the committee possesses the full fundamentals of modern computer technologies  in a broad sense, although each of them knows some (usually outdated) parts. In general, there are younger and more competent profs — but not in our department.
  Second, even where the committee did understand, they displayed rampant apathy. The first guy to present talked about how Skype with plugins is just wonderful, and it can be used at work and at home! And he made a tic-tac-toe game working over Skype. What, writing a COM plugin (or whatever it is in Skype) is a heroic feat now?  Maybe it's me who didn't fully understand something, but still — how can such a project not only be considered a Master's thesis, but also deserve a 9?

Then it got even funnier — another guy had a slide showing a cell phone, a web page, and between them — an arrow!
What the hell kind of informational load does such a slide carry? Then the guy showed that he wrote an application for a mobile platform, which in reality turned out to be a wap-site, and he visited it from different phones. And he said he was researching the possibility of using mobile platforms to create applications. Talk about waking up: in the era of Opera Mini and the triumph of  smartphones he suddenly found out that GPRS, EDGE,3G, WiFi exist and with their help you can connect to the net and visit a site! Amazing, what can you say.

My coworker was at least honest and simple: he briefly talked about what AJAX library options exist for .NET. This is in principle a project better than the rest, but here a prof dropped a gem: he said that we haven't researched AJAX here yet, because it only appeared in January 2007. Yeah right, and how come gmail and a million other sites have been working with Ajax since 2002, with the help of magic?

I would also like to talk about the people who got recommendations to study in a PhD program, but they are my friends and so just in case it's better  to keep quiet about what they told me.

I will just say that the committee members understood absolutely NOTHING from the thesis that got a 10, and the guy who wrote it was very skeptical of such a grade himself, and thinks the result is like that only because none of the professors bothered to read the thesis due to its perceived complexity. They relied on his reputation. It's not for me to judge whether this is so or not (I understood very little from the thesis), but the fact itself is alarming.

Last year an 8 went to my friend, who made his thesis  really in a rush and also thought himself that it wasn't of the best quality. (He's a good programmer anyway, better than me, at least)

The last question remains Why did I become exactly a willing victim? Because after studying for my Bachelor's I knew perfectly well what awaited me in the uni next. Nothing useful, except a completely worthless piece of paper. Those who didn't intend to put up with such a situation went to Master's programs at other universities, for example LU. And I knew my abilities and capabilities, decided to slack off and spend time on fairly useless nonsense, but at least an easy one.
And so I got the result I deserved: the apathy of my uni  and department turned into a triumph of amateurism.

In reality, I in no way consider my thesis outstanding or even good. But here arises an ethical collision, which was just recently researched again by Somebody's Scientists ™. Namely: a person easily handles a letdown on its own: he handles an unfair letdown poorly. Those papers I mentioned at the beginning were just as stupid as mine (roughly).

Why did the first guy get a 9? Because he's Latvian and beautifully told everything in his native language?
Why did the second guy get a 9, despite the fact that he told everything terribly?
Why did I get an 8? Because I stumbled in places and peeked at my piece of paper? Or because the topic seems unserious (on the slides everything was more than serious, but who understood them). Or is it really because they found a substantial problem with criteria in the paper?

In my opinion, we all should have gotten a 6, as having created nothing really useful or scientific.

If I offended anyone, sorry. Maybe I'm just an envious amateur. Or maybe something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and "the whole system here needs to be changed" (c)
The sad thing is that at Daugavpils University, where my dad went to work starting this year, the situation is similar according to rumors.

I really ought to post all this under a lock, but oh well, to hell with it. Punks aren't afraid of life.