Phd Submission Quotes

entire project would be kicked back, and he would need to start the submission process again. The proposal had to be perfect this time. If not, he was sure his competitors would swoop in on this opportunity to launch their own devices. He had spent the last two years on this project, and he was so close—only twenty-seven days left to make all the necessary corrections. He could not afford distractions now. Too much was riding on this; his name was riding on this. He remembered what his father always told him: “No one remembers the name of the person who came in second.” These words motivated him all through high school to earn a full scholarship to Boston University, where he earned his BA and master’s degrees in computer science, and then his PhD in robotics engineering at MIT. Those degrees had driven him to start his own business, Vinchi Medical Engineering, and at age thirty-four, he still lived by those words to keep the company on top. The intercom buzzed. “Your conference call is ready on line one, Mr. Vinchi.” “What the hell were you guys thinking?” Jon barked as soon as he got on the line. Not waiting for them to answer, Jon continued, “Whose bright idea was it to submit my name to participate at this event—or any event, for that matter? This type of thing has your name written all over it, Drew. Is this your doing?” As always, Trent said it the way it was. “If you had attended the last meeting, Jon, you would have been brought up to date for this and would have had the chance to voice any opposition to your participation.” It was a moot point, Jon knew he’d missed their last meeting—actually, their last few meetings—due to his own business needs. But this stunt wasn’t solely about the meeting, and he knew it. “Trent, I have always supported the decisions you guys have made in the past, but I am not supporting this one. What makes you think I will even show? I don’t have time for this nonsense.” “Time is valuable to all of us, Jon. We all have our own companies to run besides supporting what is needed for Takes One. Either you’re fully invested in this, or you’re not. There are times when it takes more than

Online submission forms are black holes. Anything is better than blindly submitting online.

It usually takes at least four weeks to write up a respectable paper submission, especially when there are six students involved in the project who need to coordinate their efforts.

They found that the crowd assembled around Innocentive was able to solve forty-nine of them, for a success rate of nearly 30 percent. They also found that people whose expertise was far away from the apparent domain of the problem were more likely to submit winning solutions. In other words, it seemed to actually help a solver to be ‘marginal’—to have education, training, and experience that were not obviously relevant for the problem. Jeppesen and Lakhani provide vivid examples of this: [There were] different winning solutions to the same scientific challenge of identifying a food-grade polymer delivery system by an aerospace physicist, a small agribusiness owner, a transdermal drug delivery specialist, and an industrial scientist. . . . All four submissions successfully achieved the required challenge objectives with differing scientific mechanisms. . . . [Another case involved] an R&D lab that, even after consulting with internal and external specialists, did not understand the toxicological significance of a particular pathology that had been observed in an ongoing research program. . . . It was eventually solved, using methods common in her field, by a scientist with a Ph.D. in protein crystallography who would not normally be exposed to toxicology problems or solve such problems on a routine basis.