About two months before I submitted the full draft of my 300+ page dissertation to my committee for my Ph.D. approval, my computer died. But that is not what this story is about.
Panicked about the time lost without a computer, I rushed to the Apple store as soon as I could. I was spending winter break in my parent’s barn that had just been converted into an apartment next to their house so I could write without interruption. The Apple store was a solid hour and a half away, in a huge mall in the center of Atlanta. It felt strange to be in such a public place, the bright lights and minimalist design of the store had always unnerved me. It was loud and crowded. As I waited for my turn at the Genius Bar, I checked my email on a sample computer. At the top of my inbox was an email from Academia.edu alerting me that a professor on my dissertation committee, we’ll call them Dr. Mao here, had uploaded a paper they had recently published in a journal that I loved. Curious, I downloaded the paper and read it as I waited my turn.
As I read it, my stomach churned and my heart dropped. The constant murmur of conversation around me fell away, and all of a sudden, I was completely alone with my thoughts as I scrolled through the essay. The language was so familiar, though the argument had been expertly changed just enough. It sounded like my paper, one that I had sent to Dr. Mao for advice a year earlier. I never received that advice, but I guess it had been read after all.