Ways in which a thesis and a newborn are similar:
- both consume all of your time, significantly cutting into your social life and making you lose contact with some friends
- both seriously interfere with getting enough sleep
- both are something you put a lot of effort into in the hope that someday they will produce a meaningful benefit to the world, but you have to accept that most likely they will both go unnoticed by the world at large
- both are capable of making you feel completely incompetent and unable to do anything right for what feels like forever
- both are a good way to meet other people doing the same thing
- friends and family give you advice on both, which is only sometimes useful
- both have a very frustrating way of telling you that something is wrong, but not indicating in any way whatsoever what is wrong
- both are expected to triple in size over the course of a year (different years of course)
- both produce lots of meaningless gibberish
Ways in which a thesis and a newborn are different:
- your thesis is never going to smile at you
- your thesis never seems to be satisfied with what you have done
- your thesis's problems can't be solved in a few minutes
- nobody has claimed that putting your uncovered thesis on your naked chest is good for anything
- your thesis didn't come into the world looking like it came from an alien race, you had to spend years working on it to provide that appearance
- your thesis doesn't smell good
- your thesis doesn't look like you, your partner, or any of your relatives
- your thesis does not become more independent over time
- your thesis will not be damaged by unexpectedly rolling off a table while your back is turned
- you don't have to thesis-proof your house
- you are not genetically programmed to fall in love with your thesis
- people offer to make food for you when you have a newborn
- people do not come over and ask to hold your thesis
- people are actually interested in your newborn (some people, not everybody)
- your thesis isn't your responsibility for 18 years (I sure hope not anyway)
- you can drop out of a PhD program
- neglecting your thesis is not illegal
- you don't have to pay people to watch your thesis when you are unable to
- you get to choose a partner for raising a newborn (most of the time)
- you can't accidentally apply to, be accepted by, and enroll in a PhD program
- there isn't a committee that decides when your newborn is good enough for you to move on with your life
- removing a useless appendix from your thesis does not require major surgery
- random strangers on the subway don't comment on or try to touch your thesis
- when you first bring your thesis home, your pets don't react to it at all
- nobody asks you to track how much waste your thesis produces
- the soft spots in your thesis won't go away on their own
- if you fall asleep with your thesis on your chest, you won't wake up to the feeling of something sucking on your neck
- you don't have to buy any furniture for your thesis
- most people know what a newborn is, but have not heard of sub-Riemannian geometry or astrodynamics
- people never mistakenly think you study stars when you say you have a newborn
- you are allowed to physically damage your thesis when you are mad at it
- your thesis is not at risk of suddenly dieing because you put it down the wrong way
- nobody thinks your thesis is "the cutest thing ever"
- people don't post pictures of their thesis on facebook (or at least not large numbers of pictures)
- you don't normally put your newborn on your resume or expect him/her to be useful for getting a job later
- your thesis never learns to sleep through the night
- when your thesis does something strange and unexpected, you can't call somebody and ask if it is actually normal
- all your ancestors successfully raised at least one child, but most of them did not do academic research
- when you talk about your child, people understand the words you are using
- you can backup your thesis in case you make a mistake later or a hardware problem causes you to lose it
- most parents don't pressure their children to get a PhD
- you can pretend to not have a thesis for a few weeks before it causes a problem
