After many late nights, thousands of dollars in grant money, and enough takeout to sustain a dynasty of racoons, we are very proud to see that you’ve discovered pretty much nothing at all!

In academia, we explore the uncharted territory of scientific knowledge, and you happened to zero in on a gigantic abyss of nothingness. Welcome!

Who knew? Sometimes having a sound hypothesis, flawless experimental design, and relentless motivation is no match for the fact that sometimes, science just kicks you in the cranium! You probably wish that was in the grad school pamphlet, huh?

In related news, your diet of mostly salt & vinegar chips has given you a persistent but extremely large rash [1]. Perhaps you can study the link on that next?

To be fair, you didn’t discover ‘nothing,’ not exactly. You discovered that ignoring your partner for six months to focus on that “world-shattering” experiment, will absolutely cause them to leave you [2]!

Despite your certainty in these new sad findings, your project supervisor has refused publish those results, and says that if you insist on doing so it must be done “on your own time.”

The post New Experiment Reveals Nothing, But You Sure Spent Six Months Of Your Life On It! appeared first on dnatured journal.

After nailing her doctorate presentation and finishing the edits on her 187-page thesis, PhD student Erika Williams finally achieved her lifelong dream; forking over a ton of money to write something with a lower readership than her teenage diary.

“I come from the lower-middle class, so I knew academia was my path to getting six figures,” said Williams, “I just thought it would be in salary.”

Currently, Williams is in six figures of crushing, non-dischargeable debt.

But don’t worry, she is already looking for a job and boasts that she has a leg up in the job market.

“Due to grad school and funding cuts [1], I’m used to the current economic model of working past your limit just to get to the poverty line.”

Still, she is happy with her decision to spend the past [“please don’t publish how long”] years writing about a subject so niche that no more than 20 other eggheads will ever skim it for keywords.

Though hopeful that her publications could be used to advance health or halt climate change, Williams cannot shake the lingering fear that her contribution to science may not have been worth the 11,371 non-biodegradable plastic pipettes she used to get it.

Now on the job hunt, she passes the months between interviews by gently telling people “no, not that type of doctor.”

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The post PhD Student Celebrates Paying Thousands Of Dollars To Write A Paper Only 17 People Will Read appeared first on dnatured journal.