Doctoral Dissertations In Haiku

One of my old professors liked to say that a poem isn't any good unless you can explain it to a three-year-old. I never would have thought one could apply that same standard to a doctoral dissertation, but then I came across a brilliant little website called Dissertation Haiku.

The site is a collection of actual doctoral dissertations that have been distilled into a single haiku. These haiku are written and submitted by the graduate students themselves. What's the point? The anonymous site editor explains:

It takes a long time to get a Ph.D. Maybe five or six years, four if you're fast. Seven if you're me. At the end, you've written a big fat document which all of your committee members will read if you're lucky. How can you gain a wider audience for the major product of ten-or-so percent of your time on Earth? Why, rewrite it as a haiku, that's how. Everybody likes haiku!

The site's only submission requirements are that you write in "plain English"--here's looking at you, particle physicists--and that you stick to the haiku's traditional 5-7-5 syllable count (scanning the site, you'll occasionally come across a submitter who clearly isn't getting a Ph.D in counting).

Submissions vary from the straightforward,

Basil Bunting was
A Northumbrian poet
These are his poems

--Robert Blair, University of Hawaii

to the opaque,

Continuous waves:
LIGO tests Albert Einstein.
Gravitational.

--David Chin, University of Michigan

to the, well, strange...

A girl runs quickly.
Light is a vampire, or friend,
or she is crazy.

--Romie Faienza, The London Film School

But the site's real genius (and real reward) is how it juxtaposes a poetic genre that necessitates clarity and brevity with the long-winded and esoteric world of the dissertation. It makes for some entertaining combinations. Take this example from Simon Bottomley at the University of Southampton:

Dissertation Title: Towards an understanding of how mobility impaired passengers use space and how this effects capacity. My dissertation examines how growing numbers of elderly and disabled passengers along with those with small children will effect the overall capacity of ticket gate lines and escalators within the London Underground network.

His haiku hits bluntly on the main point:

Can you hurry up?
I'm trying to get to work
Damn disabled

A haiku distillation can also bring out a sort of beauty. Kathy Coyne at the University of Delaware explained her research with mussels:

I sequenced the gene for one of the proteins used to make byssal threads by Mytilus edulis (the blue mussel) and showed a gradient of expression along the mussel foot. The threads encode a copolymer protein composed of elastin- and collagen-like sequences.

but her haiku gets to the heart of it:

Blue mussels tethered
Through strong stretchy tiny threads
Now your secret's told

It seems she's begun to feel attached to the little guys.

Finally, here's Andrew D. Steen's submission (from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) on seawater microbial communities. After all that research, this little poetry project seems to have given him some clarity.

I measured the rates at which dissolved polysaccharides are degraded by microbes in seawater. Differences in those rates among locations suggest that the reactivity of dissolved organic matter in seawater is determined by the nature of the microbial community as well as the chemical characteristics of organic matter. If seawater microbial communities in the Arctic Ocean begin to access a wider range of dissolved organic molecules as temperatures warm in the future, more organic matter may be converted to carbon dioxide in the Arctic Ocean.

Here's his conclusion (in haiku, of course):

Marine microbes eat
polysaccharides, except
that sometimes they don't.

Now that's something that even a three-year-old could understand...if a three-year-old were familiar with microbes and polysaccharides. Oh, you know what I mean.

Read more dissertation haiku and add your own!

Comments

[Sezin]

This is so great! Thanks so much for sharing.

[OlDirtyHastert]

Okay, this little poem (plus about 5 years of running theoretical quantum mechanical numerical simulations in the lab) was sufficient to earn me a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering:

What makes steel brittle?
Grain boundary segregation
Weakens iron bonds.

Kinda makes ya feel all Zen-like, doesn’t it? Although, now that I think about it, the computers we used to run most of our calculations were provided by a Japanese steel company. So I guess a haiku may in fact be the most appropriate means of publishing our results!

[OlDirtyHastert]

Putting together the above poem proved to be such an enjoyable intellectual exercise, that I decided to go all out and post my entire formal academic record in this forum, in a series of short, sweet and succinct haikus, of course. So here they all are, with each poem representing one of my other post-secondary degrees. I hope you enjoy these. But if not, just reflect upon how much worse of an experience it must have been for each of my various advisors and committee members to have been forced to read the corresponding theses!

BSE in Biomedical Engineering:

To lengthen a leg.
Compressed gas exerts pressure
Instead of a screw.

MSEE in Electrical Engineering:

Zinc Oxide sensors
Conduct less current when hot.
Surface states trap charge.

MS in Chemistry:

In many solids.
Positronium lifetimes
Too brief to measure.

PhD in Materials Science & Engineering (original dissertation topic):

Crystals grown in space
Avoid gravity’s defects.
But Shuttle destroyed!

That last line is a reference to the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger, which was to have served as the laboratory for most of our experiments, but instead met its untimely end in January 1986.

[Uniqua]

ABD
After all these years
ABD

[ModernTimes1]

Aki kaze yo
Ganchu no mono
Mina haiku

Autumn wind:
Everything I see-
Is haiku.

Takahama Kioshi.

[GhostwriterDoF]

Revealed in their fields,
the wilderness of science,
facts flower in truth.

[ModernTimes1]

Stubbed my toe
Walking by the lilly pond
I scream long time.

[PropagandaHaikuist]

thought pollination
affecting flowering minds
to keep it simple

[kjstjohn]

Nice!

[malodorousgit]

Brilliant. I love it.

[provgrays]

This should be an unofficial requirement for every doctorate and Masters degree in the country.

[William Benjamin Myers]

My Dissertation in Haiku:

Mystery Shopper
The Panoptican in Action
Now Who Can We Trust?

[billstewart]

Haiku isn't just a syllable-count pattern - it also needs to have a seasonal / nature reference.
Writing a short poem,
with seventeen syllables,
late in the summer.

[ModernTimes1]

My masters thesis:

Hungarian village
Bartok dances counting
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 Oppa!

[malodorousgit]

They dance to Fibonacci time? That is very freaky!

[ModernTimes1]

Bartok: Hungarian folk music and Fibonacci series as compositional determinant.

[kjstjohn]

LOL!

[malodorousgit]

Who'd have thought? What an excellent topic.

[minimalist syntax]

There are some deep truths there to be discovered.

[ModernTimes1]

Summer
dirty kitchen floor
the fruit flies are relentless.

[provgrays]

Remember, the syllable count has to go 5-7-5.

[ModernTimes1]

5-7-5 makes no sense in English. due to nature of Japanese ( and Chinese) languages 5-7-5 provides a perfect structure. In Western language 5-7-5 it is a stilted and almost grotesque format.

[db08]

words trapped under tongues
planning a slow escape and
finding spaces to fill

[TovSquirrel]

Thank you for the light
I was wandering alone
In the vast wastelands