Nota bene: Ivan Tribble made me write this. Just to see what happens.

So, like many readers, yesterday was my first day of school. My last first day.

I’ve been reading a lot of similar-sounding first sentences about “first day” among my closely-linked neighbors in the blogosphere. But they’re mainly attending to lecture preparation, what to wear (!?), and pedagogic style, and dealing with students.

I, on the other hand, had to buy the last few books, get my student email account activated, and find the right classrooms. And [here's where I really start to pay for non-anonymity] not fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon session.

Regular readers may be confused. See, what they might be confused about is that last year at about this time I had my penultimate first day of school: I started up as a brand new 40-year-old Nontraditional Graduate Student in the Ph.D. program in Industrial & Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan.

Then in October I withdrew completely, because a number of family members and close friends were suddenly sick and dying. And life trumps school.

[Dyed-in-the-wool academic readers, whether graduate students or faculty, should be admonished always to remember that: life trumps school. They are and always should remain different things, and it to their credit that my department, its Chair and most of the faculty understand and emphasize this fact from new-student orientation onwards: the worst thing in the world to do is keep on diligently forging ahead, grit your teeth and show some guts, and let your life (which can always go more badly than it is now) drive your academic career into the ground. It's always easier and smarter to take time off from school to deal with life, than it is to take time off from life and stick to school. I made the wrong choice once before in my life, in the almost-Ph.D. in Biology that dangles like a withered limb from my antepenultimate first day of school; it really did not work out well for me, even though I expect the department is merrily chugging along much as it was fifty years ago.]

[And the same goes for "work" of other sorts, too, by the way. There's nothing special about the academy.]

At any rate, by mutual consent my department and I agreed that yesterday was actually also a first day, and we are all effectively amnesiac about last year. In this context, I see that this coming Patriot Day Sunday I turn 41. [Happy goddamned birthday to me]. As my little nod to midlife crisis, yesterday’s foray into Linear Programming, Discrete Event Simulation, and Decision Support Systems is unilaterally denoted the Last Try for Graduate Education. Excepting this Ph.D. in IOE, the only degrees I’m gonna get henceforth will be honorary.

Motivation for graduate school? Especially given the obvious chip on my shoulder?

Am I a straggler of the dotcom refugee wave of the Aughties, or the first harbinger of the Big Rusty Iron refugee wave of the Teens? In fact both of those, and neither: we started a great little dotcom, but aborted it by choice when we saw the writing on the funding wall. And I got loads of cash consulting for Big Iron companies, but have been telling them for more than a decade that they’d better learn their way around agile and adaptive machine-learning based management and design models, but to no avail. And so now I have decided to dance a little sidestep around my project champions in-company, and send my message roundabout… let’s just say via an “external source”.

And also I’m a theorist trapped in the body of a Highly Paid Consultant: I want the institutions I’m supposedly helping to think and learn, not just react and write stuff down. I want to express the fundamental structure of search spaces, and predict the graph transforms imposed by subtle modifications of search methods’ parameters. There’s no suitable ontology to date for describing the intricate interplay of an engineering problem, the representation we select, the search method we apply, and the performance measures we invoke to gauge success. And basically there’s not enough people thinking about metaheuristics, about what they actually are. And there are not enough Philosophers of Engineering. And it’s time to talk freely and openly about biological design. None of which I can do as a Suit, even in the lala-land of corporate research. (Well, OK, maybe at Google or Microsoft).

And also I’m an old fart who got in really, really deep optimism-cooking hot water for talking out of context (because there was no context) about “biological engineering” and “applications of search and optimization in synthetic biomedical systems” in a Biology department (of all places) the early 90s, who now finds he can sign up for goddamned classes in the exact same stuff we used to suggest in grant proposals as things that might eventually maybe be interesting and feasible. Hell, I bet I proofread or reviewed some of the papers in the bibliography of the readings in this class….

And also because it’s time to put my money — which is today reduced to my time and attention — where my mouth has been for a decade.

And also because being a graduate student, or an underfunded junior professor, or a research-loving fresh-tenured prof who’s unknowingly next in line for a chairmanship, or a committee-burdened department chairman, or a director of a Center sucks so very much. No, really. It really, in context, sucks. I am friend to all these people, and they all wrestle with organizational and institutional issues that should and can be fixed. And the fact that something you love sucks, but may, with ambition and skill and lots of luck, be fixed, is enough to make it worth the attempt.

So. “Nontraditional student”. Yeah. I’m sure we all know what that phrase means. It’s a handy descriptor for people like me: coming back to the academic fold, after having been subjected to a family or a job or some other Nontraditional obstruction to the right and proper expected course of education. Delayed along the way, having as a result a terribly reduced bibliography and very bad attitudes about how many hours a student should be expected to work, or how much they should be paid, or what to expect from an instructor.

Yup. I’m definitely firmly flying under the flag of Nontraditional. Because, after all, it gives one excellent cover.