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 8 out of 10. That's roughly a 5 on the Russian scale. 9 is a 5+, 10 is a result with special distinction.
Overall, I became a voluntary victim of glamour and discourse.

   Glamour — because my grade was lowered to an 8 due to a sloppy presentation. The presentation was in Latvian, which I know very poorly. I couldn't memorize it word-for-word, and didn't have time to finish it anyway, I have a job, after all. Plus I have no public speaking experience, and it shows.
  And why discourse  — I'll have to explain in detail and a bit harshly. First, the committee didn't understand most of what was being talked about. 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 fully grasps the basics of modern computer technologies  in a broad sense, although each of them knows some (usually outdated) parts. Generally, there are younger and more competent profs around — but not in our department.
  Second, even where the committee did understand, they displayed blatant indifference. The first person to speak was a guy who talked about how Skype with plugins is just wonderful, and he can use it at work and at home! And he made a tic-tac-toe game working through Skype. What, writing a COM plugin (or whatever it is in Skype) is a heroic feat now?  Maybe I 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 that showed a cell phone, a web page, and between them — a little arrow!
What the hell kind of informational load does a slide like that carry? Then the guy showed that he had written an app for a mobile platform, which actually turned out to be a WAP site, and he visited it from different phones. And he said he was exploring 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 else can you say.

My coworker was at least honest and straightforward: he briefly explained the available options for AJAX libraries for .NET. This is, in principle, a better thesis than the rest, but here a prof took the cake: he said we hadn't researched AJAX yet because it only appeared in January 2007. Welp, so how have Gmail and a million other sites been working with Ajax since 2002, by magic?

I'd also like to talk about the people who got recommendations for PhD studies, but they are my friends, and therefore just in case, it's better  to keep quiet about what they told me.

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

Last year, an 8 was given to my friend, who made his thesis  really hastily and also believed it wasn't of the best quality himself. (He's a good programmer anyway, better than me, at any rate)

That leaves the final question Why did I become a voluntary victim specifically? Because after my bachelor's studies, I knew perfectly well what awaited me at the university next. Nothing useful, except for a completely worthless piece of paper. Those who weren't willing to put up with this situation went to do their master's at other universities, like LU. But I knew my abilities and limitations, decided to slack off and spend time on useless nonsense, but at least it was easy.
So I got the result I deserved: the indifference of my uni  and department turned into a triumph of amateurism.

Actually, I don't consider my thesis outstanding or even good at all. But here arises an ethical collision, which Some Scientists ™ recently explored again. Namely: a person easily handles a bummer on its own: he poorly handles an unfair bummer. The theses I mentioned at the beginning were just as dumb as mine (roughly).

Why did the first guy get a 9? Because he's Latvian and explained everything beautifully in his native language?
Why did the second guy get a 9, despite the fact that he explained everything awfully?
Why did I get an 8? Because I stumbled in places and peeked at my notes? Or because the topic seems unserious (everything on the slides was more than serious, but who understood them). Or indeed because they found a significant problem with the criteria in the thesis?

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

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

I really ought to lock this post up, but to hell with it. Punks aren't afraid of life.