Every year, countless innocent young minds enter an institution known as graduate school, with the goal of obtaining a "PhD". As many as half of them, however, do not successfully complete the requirements for a PhD and leave graduate school without one, their life an abject failure (Golde and Fiske 1997). Etzowski and colleagues (2000) have proposed that many students fail to complete their PhDs because the methods for success in academia are implicit and not made clear to graduate students.

In determining what implicit skills are necessary to obtain a PhD, we must first determine what exactly a PhD is. The dictionary defines it as "doctor of philosophy" (Merriam-Webster 2002), telling us absolutely nothing.

Abandoning formal literature review, we move to folklore and oral tradition. (Campbell et al 1991) One major piece of folklore on the PhD was told to me when I was but a lad, on my father's knee. He told me that when I got my B.S., I would be able to "bullshit" -- when I got my M.S., I would have "more shit", and that finally, upon reaching my PhD, it would be "piled higher and deeper". (Baker 1982)

This articulation of the meaning of PhD has some societal currency -- as shown by the popular comic strip "Piled Higher and Deeper". (Cham in press) Many graduate students have never heard of this comic strip, thus giving some support to the hypothesis that the skills needed for success in academia are not well known.

In the remainder of this paper, I investigate the burning question -- is the ability to produce shit the main requirement for success in graduate school?

DESIGN

Thirteen graduate students and five professors at a major research university were given a survey designed to elicit the frequency and volume of their "productivity". One participant was eliminated from consideration after referring to the experimenter behind his back as a "loser-freak with way too much time on his hands". (Trusted-Friend 2002)

Rather than asking the participants for their general observations about their productivity, we asked them to report statistics only for the previous day. Although this risks being unrepresentative of general performance, it gives better accuracy, as participants are better at recalling specific recent events than at estimating the frequency of past events in general. (Ericsson and Simon 1993)

Fig. 1: The Twinkie Unit (TW) -- a proposed standard measurement unit for poop. (2 TW pictured here)

Frequency was assessed by asking how many bowel movements the participant had the previous day. Volume was assessed by asking participants to identify the size of their last bowel movement. In determining a survey question for volume, it was necessary to develop a unit of volume familiar to all our participants and within an order of magnitude of the amount of shit produced in an average bowel movement. After extensive user-pretesting and in-context interviews (Beyer and Holtzblatt 1998), I developed a unit of volume which I hope will become standard in future studies of this domain -- the TW, or "twinkie unit", shown in figure 1. An additional desirable feature of the twinkie unit is the extensive amount of prior research on the properties of twinkies. (Gouge and Stadler 1995)

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

There was a significant trend in the frequency of bowel movements -- however, it was the opposite of what we expected. As a student got closer to their PhD, every year closer corresponded to 0.762 fewer bowel movements, as shown in figure 12. (F(17,1)=6.153, p<0.05) The same trend appeared in volume of production, although it was not significant. As a student got closer to their PhD, every year closer corresponded to 0.499 TW less volume. (F(17,1)=2.146, p=0.16)

The conclusion is simple. It is not that PhD candidates learn to produce large amounts of shit. Instead, as students get closer to a PhD, they become better at saving their shit for journal submissions, rather than expending it fruitlessly. This is strikingly similar to the skill practiced by tantric masters, who practice withholding their semen to avoid expending life-force unnecessarily. (Sinha 1993)

Despite the clear importance of this technique to obtaining a PhD, it is not discussed in the research methods classes at my university -- or, I suspect, at many universities in non-Buddhist countries. To remedy this oversight, I recommend that courses in this essential discipline be added to all graduate programs.

The findings presented here also suggest that there may be a simple intervention which will assist students towards gaining their PhD -- the indiscriminate and excessive prescription and usage of anti-diarrheal drugs such as Lomotil and Immodium. We provide Ritalin to elementary school students and Viagra to elderly professors -- surely the suffering PhD student is equally important.

-- Ryan Shaun Baker

Fig. 2: The closer you are to your PhD, the fewer movements you have.

REFERENCES

• Baker, S. (1992) Personal Communication.
• Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. (1998) Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. San Francisco, CA: Academic Press.
• Campbell, J., Moyers, B., Flowers, B.S. (1991) The Power of Myth. New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell.
• Cham, J. (in press) Piled Higher and Deeper. Stanford, CA: Piled Higher and Deeper Publishing.
• Ericsson, K.A. and Simon, H.A. (1993) Protocol Analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Etzowski, H., Kemelgor, C., and Uzzi, B. (2000) Athena Unbound: The Advancement of Women in Science and Technology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (2002). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.
• Golde, C.M. and Fiske, P. (1997) Graduate School and the Job Market of the 1990s: A Survey of Young Geoscientists. Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, Electronic Supplement. 21 October 1997.
• Gouge, C. and Stadler, T. (1995) The TWINKIES Project. http://www.twinkiesproject.com/
• Sinha, I. (1993) The Great Book of Tantra: Translations and Images from the Classic Indian Texts. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions Ltd.
• Trusted-Friend, A. (2002) Personal Communication.