HALIFAX, N.S. — If you have an active dal.ca email address, and you’re unfortunate enough to be signed up automatically for a certain mailing list, you might have received one, two, or possibly three hundred emails telling you about master thesis defences. If you’ve received any of these emails, you’ve likely treated them the same way you’d treat an email promising penis enlargement: ignoring it (because you’re perfect the way you are and your maybe penis is already the perfect size). However, there is one person who has made it their mission to attend every single thesis defense he can.
Gary Braxton is a third-year Canadian studies student who may have the saddest personal life ever recorded, possibly in human history. Braxton lives in a one-room monochrome apartment and his only friend is a dead houseplant. He hasn’t paid power or water bills in weeks, which has resulted in a living condition that is perpetually dim and carries an air of despair (and, reportedly, human waste). He has no family, no ambitions, and almost had no reason to even live, until he found himself joining a teams meeting for “design and implementation of a machine learning-based tor traffic detection system” out of complete boredom, which (while being a bunch of nonsense words he didn’t understand) exhilarated him.
Since that initial spark, he has attended every single thesis defense he could, to the point he has become somewhat of a campus-celebrity amongst examining committees. After attending no less than sixty this past calendar year (yes, since January), committee members have begun to comfortably defer to him for judgement during deliberation periods when they are indecisive. This has led to Braxton accidentally amassing a terrifyingly deep expertise regarding artificial intelligence, civil engineering, economics and dozens of other topics, which is frankly a long way for a guy to go considering he started this journey making ramen inside of a toilet.
Braxton has begun to work on his masters thesis, with his topic being the art of masters theses themselves. While it’s unclear whether or not Braxton is still even an active student at this point, he’s clearly playing to a certain amount of nepotism gained by his existing relationships with dozens of committee members. His story goes to show that if you ever feel completely at a standstill in life, and feel like there’s no hope of you ever achieving your dreams, just start showing up to random academic events until they hand you a degree.
By Jake Waldner