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.