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by Laurent Bossavit.
Original Post: An autodidact graduates
Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts)
Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf
Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different.
You'll remember the start of the story. I blogged about it roughly one month into the process. One month earlier, I had decided to take advantage of a local law passed the previous year, concerning the equivalence between academic studies and professional experience. Here's how it worked out for me.
The first thing you're supposed to do is select a degree which matches in educational requirements what your professional experience demonstrates you can do.
That's not as easy as it sounds, to start with; there are no published criteria of equivalence, not even a rough guideline like N years worth of experience are good for M semesters of study. Then there's the problem of which university to apply to. There's one in Paris which is supposedly specialized in studies for professionals, but when I inquired there I basically got lost in a bureaucratic maze.
In the end I happened to have an insider contact through my Dad at one of the regular universities, who advised me both on what level of degree to go for and who I needed to talk to on the administrative side.
Once you have selected a degree and a place to get it, you apply for validation, which (legally) consists of putting together a dossier to convince a jury of your aptitude, and putting in an appearance in person before the jury. And, in principle, that's it. The jury has broad authority to deny the request, grant it and award you the degree, or award it conditional on any amount of "remedial" coursework.
As it happened, I was also counseled to enroll in at least one class, because the law on validation still goes against the grain for most teachers in the university, who think a degree should only be awarded for duly wasting your time in class. Also working against me was the fact that, if approved, I would be granted the equivalent of eight semesters' worth of degree in one big lump; for some of these same types that's asking for a lot.
I had a few things working for me: 12 years' experience (I'm not sure that swung the most weight), coauthorship on one book and a handful of articles (publications matter a LOT to academics), and one letter of reference from Jerry Weinberg (I'm fairly sure that counted too).
Tuesday morning I sat before the jury, to whom I had submitted a 30-page biography (not counting annexes). They asked a total of one question, which was "We hear you've signed up for one class, which was it ?" That was actually a favor to me, I figured out afterwards - in my summation I had forgotten to mention taking that class, and that I had scored 18 out of 20 on the mid-semester exam. So I had a chance to trot that out.
Later that day the decision came down: if I pass the final exam for that course (Distributed Systems & Client/Server, covering Sun RPC, Java RMI, CORBA, NFS and assorted oddments), I'll be entitled to the degree. The final exam will be on january 22nd, 2004.
I've invested some time, some money, but above all a lot of emotional energy into that over the past three months. My Achille's heel is fear of rejection - it was a big risk for me to take the chance of being turned down on something like that. In the end if was well worth the effort.
Now I'm toying with the idea of perhaps waiting one year or two to reap a bit more experience, and then see if I can skip two more semesters and swing an entry into "doctoral studies" - provided that can actually consist of doing my job, whatever that will turn out to be at the moment, and turning new ideas from that into worthwhile research. Just a blue-sky idea at the moment, of course. It's probably impossible. So was the first part of this adventure, only two years ago.
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