HUMOR
I Wrote My Master’s Thesis in 8 Hours (One Night), And Here’s How I Did That
If you’re like most students, you probably spend weeks or even months on a master’s thesis. But for one student, writing his thesis in 8 hours was all it took. Here’s how he (actually it’s me) did it.
If you’re like most students, you dread writing your master’s thesis. But if you’ve ever written an essay in high school or college, you know you can write a thesis in 8 hours (or just one night).
Here’s how:
- Start with an outline. Create a skeleton of your paper that outlines the key points you want to make. This will help you focus and keep track of what you’ve written.
- Throw that outline into the trash, because you are screwed.
You can’t write a master’s thesis in one day. You simply can’t.
Well, I had to.
The origin story
I was drinking beer with my friends at the local pub. It is a place I go to with my gang pretty often.
While we talk I felt vibrations in my pocket. My phone has received a notification.
Not being really drawn in the conversation, I checked what that was, only to see a mail from my thesis supervisor.
The title was crude and trivial. It said:
RE: Master’s Thesis file required
At that point, I knew I was screwed.
My face must have turned pale as one of my colleagues asked me what was going on. I explained the severe predicament I found myself in.
At that moment I had two things to do:
- I could stay and drink with friends, as I was already screwed up, or
- I could run home and try to craft a masterpiece in one sitting.
Being a responsible person, I decided to leave the gang and rush home. By the time my Uber drove me back to my neighborhood, it was 9-ish. Being a late March evening, the street lamps were already lit.
During the transit two trains of thoughts were playing Mario Cart in my head, trying to win the first spot for my attention.
The first was obviously the idea of writing my thesis, the other being curious about how long would my friends gossip about me that night.
The game plan
The game plan, as I like to call it, was quite simple.
I started with the first principles mental model. Screw all the tips my supervisor had sent me over the last months.
I had time till approximately 6 because I had to send the file in the very morning if I desired to defend it that year. And I really wanted to.
So I had more or less 8 hours.
Quick calculations. A master’s thesis is supposed to be between 72 to 96 thousand characters as far as the text is concerned. The required page count is something like 60–90 pages.
Depending on a source, you can say that a word equals roughly 6–7 characters, for Polish. For English it is closer to 5, alas I was required to write the thesis in my native tongue which is Polish.
I assumed 7 characters per word and took a safe thesis length of 77k characters. That would constitute 11k words.
If I wrote 1,500 words per hour, after 8 hours I would have 12,000 words.
Thus 11,000 words sounded doable.
The execution
I was sitting at my desk and was feeling a little tired already. Fortunately, I had a whole set of Monster Energy drinks readily available, on standby for emergency use. That night was surely such an emergency.
First things first. I plugged my mechanical keyboard with spray-lubed Gateron Yellow switches. That would allow me to type fast, without the need to worry about keyboards typing lag of ≤3 ms. It’s not much, but sometimes you can feel it.
Then I began to adjust my Herman-Miller office chair. I raised it a little and tried the back of the chair. I leaned on the back to try the springs and all.
It felt super comfortable.
I was ready.
I began to write. I quickly came up with the table of contents. From that, I created the whole barebone with chapters and sub-chapters and formatted everything accordingly.
I had a few books on the topic lying open on the desk. My process was to take a look and then write a paragraph on the topic.
It resembled the act of swimming as I took a deep breath (read a chunk of the source material) and then swam underwater for an extended period (writing). I called this method water-writing.
I could feel the flow, the work experience was so smooth and so effective that I gained momentum.
With every paragraph written I wanted to write one more, to see the number of words increase in 1s, in 10s, and in 100s as I finished every subsequent page.
The sun started to rise. My room suddenly regained its colors as the sunshine barged in through the window.
I was happy, my thesis was finished.
Then my phone started ringing. It was my thesis advisor.
The reality
I wanted to grab the phone but my arm felt numb. Technically it didn’t feel at all. Then it started to feel a bit funny, and eventually normal enough for me to pick up the damn phone.
“Where is your thesis file? I can’t see it in my inbox, I have checked the spam folder. It’s not there.” The voice was soft, but I knew there was a trace of irritation.
“I will send it in a moment, I was just doing some polishing.”
“Do it, please. I want to have it checked with antiplagiarism software before my first lecture.”
She hung up.
It was convenient because I was speechless at the moment.
Turns out the whole magic flow and writing process was just a dream. And my arm felt funny because I used it as a pillow for the entire night.
I had like one minute to send her the file. Obviously, I couldn’t do anything sensible.
However, I could try to buy myself a little more time. So I played the oldest trick in the book:
- I created a brand new MS Word .docx file.
- I filled the file with random pictures of cats and saved it on my desktop.
- After it bloated to 4 Mb, I opened it with Notepad.
- Upon seeing a string of random characters, of a seemingly infinite length, I removed exactly one character.
- I saved the file again.
Now if you tried to open it, a pop-up would appear that said the file is damaged and cannot be opened.
I sent the file.
Plan B
I was desperate at this point.
I would buy the thesis if only I didn’t have a specific topic and theme already assigned. I couldn’t order it because I obviously had no time.
But what if I found a similar thesis? Or even on an identical topic?
That was a ludicrous idea, but I tried it anyway. Surprise, surprise — I found nothing. I tried in English and found one that was basically what I needed. But there was nothing in Polish.
Even if I did find something, it would never go undetected through the antiplagiarism software my university uses.
But what about an English thesis translated into Polish? That could work…
I felt awful when I opened Google Translate and pressed the “upload file button”.
I felt equally awful when I downloaded the .docx version of the translation and just changed the author’s name and the title to my own.
After a deep breath that barely calmed me down, I sent the translated one. I didn’t even bother checking any gibberish grammar that could come out of that shenanigans.
I left a note saying “Sorry for sending you the wrong file. Please see the correct one attached.”
A moment later a reply came: “Thanks, I just wanted to call about that.”
Follow up
If you do not know how grades work in Poland, you can receive a number between 2 and 5. 2 is a fail, 3 is satisfactory, 4 means good and 5 stands for very good.
I received very good from my thesis advisor (I think out of solidarity) and good from the neutral reviewer. My average grade was thus 4.5, or a good plus.
That was surprisingly satisfying given I spent like 5 minutes on that file.
What is even more surprising is what happened next.
A professor at my university who was my thesis reviewer mailed me with an inquiry about the references I used in my thesis. He mentioned that he gave me 4 instead of 5 because he couldn’t find some books I mentioned in my bibliography. He suspected they didn’t exist and wanted to solve the matter once and for all.
What?
I sprung to my computer to check what the hell he was referring to. Turns out Google Translate translated (nomen omen) not only the titles of the items in the bibliography but also most of the names of authors. To the extent that when somebody had a name that was a noun in English, it became a noun in Polish.
In consequence, Smith became Kowal, House became Dom, and even Sausage became Kiełbasa. As funny as it would seem, it created a problem for me.
The professor wanted to see those books in physical form. Otherwise, I would be in trouble. He didn’t say that but I suspected that anyway.
What did I do?
I googled all the books he wanted to check and fortunately found them in the .pdf version. Alas, I translated them and sent the Polish version to the professor.
He accepted them and apologized for his initial lack of trust.
A few years have passed since that day.
Turns out my hoax books were cited thousand of times already. One of the “authors”, Jacek Kiełbasa, even earned a Hirsh index of 250. It means he was quoted 250 times for every citation he used.
I have started in the meantime a Ph.D. course and today I’m sending my thesis draft. The professor is my advisor.
No, I did not translate a ready dissertation from English to Polish. I couldn’t find anything for the topic I chose so I had to pay somebody to write it for me.
Disclaimer. This post is a satire. Nearly everything I have mentioned here never happened. I didn’t translate a master’s thesis from English into Polish and submit it for defence. I didn’t write a master’s thesis at all.
Despite that, I am really doing my PhD.
Hi, it’s Eric. Thank you for reading. I hope you’ve found the article at least slightly compelling. What can you do now?
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