Right after I get admitted, I inform Professor that I also have a full-time job. He insists that we must start working right away. I quit as a result and instantly breathe a refined air. I am now a scientist! A week later I approach Professor and let him know I'm ready for work.

"Ready for what?" he greets me as though our previous conversation didn't happen. I remind him that he's my PhD supervisor and that, at his proposal, we are studying the effects of electromagnetic fields on patients with carotid stent implants. "There is nothing for you to do at the University, you can stay home for now," he tells me. Is he really serious? Does he want me to do research from bed? I insist on reading materials related to our field of research. I want to start right away. But he can't recommend any.

My first day of research is over. It's autumn 2009. I spend the following days of my academic life oversleeping and strolling the city parks. I actually enjoy this newfound freedom from the alarm clock. I think, not without a certain longing, of my former factory colleagues. How we used to laugh at the stupidest of things, how it all felt like a big family. But I have a new life now. An intellectual one.

A few weeks go by. No word from Professor. It's exhausting to conduct research like this. I need some color. I approach Professor again and ask for basic research equipment, "I need an office, Professor," I begin, and, after a short while, I raise my stakes, "And a computer, too!" I've gone too far. "Everybody is happy around here, except you!!!" he snaps at me. I get a feeling that I'm going nowhere with Professor.

I approach the Head of Department. The Head listens carefully for my complaints and kindly informs me he doesn't mingle in Professor's business. It is up to my advisor to decide where the resources are allocated within his team. A nice way of deflecting responsibility.

The Faculty's Dean doesn't give a damn either but I think he wants to avoid even more troubles seeing that I'm so stubborn. I soon receive an email from Professor as a result. He decides to offer me an office and a computer. Two months wasted. Even so, I celebrate my first academic victory.

"Grab a computer and follow me," Professor instructs me a few days later. I can barely hide my enthusiasm. We take the stairs to the first floor. Then ground floor. Then basement. "Almost there," I hear Professor in the darkness. After two more turns he opens a big door and hands me over the keys. My office is a rather spacious but austere room in the University's basement. My initial enthusiasm is fading. There's a simple desk with a basic chair at one end and a small, too high to reach window at the other. The walls are immaculately white. A hospital-style metal locker where Professor keeps his valuables under key completes the picture.

"Doctoral Studies in Engineering Sciences for Developing the Knowledge-Based Society" is the name of our project. It pays me, and approximately one hundred other colleagues of mine, all PhD candidates, our €500/month scholarships, or about the average wage. It's one project from among the four thousand projects sponsored by the European Union's "Operational Program for Human Resources Development." This grandiose program, with an available budget of €5 billion, aims to "develop the human capital and increase competitiveness by bringing education and life-long learning in sync with a modern, flexible and inclusive labor market and increase future opportunities for 1.650.000 people." Yes, those are millions, 15.000 of which are to become PhD students! The Government says so, I it as fact.

For my part, I have to publish at least three scientific papers, present my research at one international conference and successfully defend my thesis in public. I have exactly three years at my disposal. If I fail, I have to return my scholarship in full. It's also up to me to rejoin the labor market and take care of my future, possibly as a teaching assistant here, at the University. So I take things seriously and go to work each morning. I learn and labor as hard as I can.

I begin with the documentation phase and I read, among others, a very detailed series of experiments: human subjects placed in anechoic chambers with all kinds of electromagnetic fields directed at them. They measure changes in sweat rate, breathing rate, exhaled humidity, body temperatures, blood pressure and everything one can imagine. They try to figure out how the body responds and adapts to such an external stimulus.

I, for my side, have to see what happens inside the human neck artery when an implanted stent heats up under the influence of electromagnetic fields. How does the body react and compensate for such a temperature increase, if there is one? I have things to discover. But I also have zero lab equipment. Not even a digital thermometer, let alone medical equipment of the kind I would need. The whole medical engineering's lab, the one I took my computer from, is a room twice the size of my basement with ten desktop computers in it, a blackboard, a small window blocked by another building and an extra door for a special room: Professor's own office.

Critically, I do not even get to see or touch a real stent. We don't have any. There are no interactions with patients, no collaboration with doctors and no conversations with other engineers from our University. I'm alone in my office. I'm not sure what people do around here. When the whole Department gathers around, I hear professors complaining about "kids these days" but zero technical discussions and hardly any interest in scientific topics. We are one-man teams, each working in their only little basements, so to speak.

Professor reassures me that computer simulations are enough for our study. So I try to find software licenses plus realistic computer models for my stents and human heads. They all cost money and are hard to find. To develop them from scratch is outside my specialty. Ideally, I should understand a bit of human biology, too, but that's again outside my specialty. I wonder at this point if I actually have a specialty. What makes me qualified to approach these issues? Why would my "discoveries", born out of such meager possibilities, have any relevance for science?

I don't lack motivation, though. I try to get a license for the €20k per year software we're using. It proves to be another catacombic adventure. The company offers two free licenses per public institution. I ask Professor for a license, but "There aren't any left," he informs me. "Don't we have two?" I insist. "Well, yes, but one license is on my laptop, which I always carry with me, and the other is on my office computer," he replies. I ask permission to his office to run some simulations from time to time, but "No, my office is closed and only I have the key." I conclude Professor has a terrible fondness for locks and keys. I drop it. I'm not sure what he does with two licenses. Maybe he sells them on the black market? Maybe Professor is a gangster? Who knows.

One of my colleagues who is pursuing his PhD in the same Department under a different professor and a similar area of research, with whom I only cross paths when our blood pressure runs too high, happens to also work for a public institution. He applies for the two free licenses and is generous enough to offer me one.

Another victory. But I'm fed up with these victories. It's exhausting to fight all these absurd battles. My time is running out. I have to write some papers soon. I accept my fate. I accept I'm not gonna be a scientist the way I've imagined more than a year ago. I don't see any future for me here at the University. As a result, I simplify things tremendously. I draw a big sphere and pretend it's a human head, I place a long metallic cylinder inside it and pretend it's a real stent and I place a simple antenna close by. Anything more complicated than this crashes my toy computer. I soon realize that I play scientist like kids play cop with water pistols.

I get to publish my first paper in this way. I'm actually quite proud of it, given the circumstances. I actually start to enjoy writing. I put down my colleague as a co-author as a thank you for lending me the license. We've learned this trick from the professors who do it all the time with their books, papers and conferences. They are required, just as we are, to publish and look active in the community per their contract with the University.

Out of curiosity, I start reading our school's newspaper, as my colleague calls our University's scientific journal. I soon spot inconsistencies. The wording is in plain, boring language with long introductions repeating the same generalities and facts known to all. But the style changes unexpectedly sometimes. I search these peculiar phrases online and my intuition is confirmed. Unacknowledged commandeering of intellectual labor via indiscriminate copy and paste practices. Plagiarism, in short. I find dozens of such instances. I see the name of our Head in there, too. I try to raise awareness for a month or two. Nobody gives a damn.

I stop reading the school's newspaper and concentrate on publishing my other papers instead. They are nothing more than variations on the first paper with different titles and different pictures. I let my computer run overnight and invent slightly different simulation scenarios and I underline different aspects of my results in each paper. After this, I take a more relaxed approach regarding my scientific pursuits, enjoy the show around me instead and stop giving a damn about Professor from now on.

I notice the Head is emphasizing the "academic dress code" all the time. He even publishes an official Department guideline on this topic pressing us all to read it. I notice professors are always addressing each other formally even in informal settings, though they've been acquainted for years. This title caries great importance here. I myself make a blunder in this respect when I visit Professor's office one day for some official papers. I ask if he's around but I refer to him by his family name only. I get admonished for skipping the "professor" part. I apologies, add the missing title and address the question again. "No, Professor is not here!" comes the reply abruptly.

Our Head both informs and threatens us, "Per the Department guidelines, every PhD candidate is required to teach for one semester. Find yourselves a seminar or a lab or I'll pick one for you." It so happens that I get friendly with an electronics department's professor. He asks me to be his teaching assistant. I inform the Head with great pleasure about this development and he, in turn, informs me with great satisfaction that "I do not give this position to PhD candidates." I insist, but in vain. I get used to insisting in vain. I get used to failing to figure out how this whole clusterfuck works. One colleague is appointed to teach C++ by the Head. "You know C++?" I ask enthusiastically, as I am looking to become a software engineer myself at this point. "I don't," she informs me, "but there's enough time until Monday to learn it." It's Friday, the last day of my teaching career.

Professor becomes my hero for a short time during a Department meeting. He insists that the design of high-voltage power lines is not actually a subject for his medical students. He wants more biology and medical related courses, instead. I truly believe in his vision. My mouth is wide open. But the Head again masterfully defends his position insisting on the necessity of assigning the minimum required number of hours per semester to each member of our Department, per the University guidelines. Nobody backs up my hero, not even he himself. The next topic on the agenda is the training of all our staff in the arts of digital blackboards "to help improve the teaching experience."

I'm sinfully enjoying myself. What else do they do around here? Mrs. S. is our Department's team assistant. She's near retirement age and lives up in the attic. We visit her monthly to physically sign our presence in the attendance register. Sometimes she scolds us for signing in the wrong place, "That was a public holiday! You didn't work then, did you?!" There is no "Sir" nor "professor" with her. We are inhabiting a prestigious institution of higher learning, otherwise she would certainly call us morons. I'm wondering at the inefficiency on relying on handwritten notebooks for timekeeping. This Technical University has a Computer Science department, after all. But things are as they should be around here. There are many advantages to the analog methods. For instance, we avoid software bugs so this method is more precise, it fosters social interactions so it is more humane, we avoid proprietary software so users have complete control to modify the source code. We turn up once a month, sign and then we're free to do whatever. The Professor has given me the correct advice on that first day.

The only constant human presence in the whole building during the warm summer days is the cleaning lady. I befriend her and we talk each morning. She provides me with paper towels and liquid soap for "When you might need it." Summer is vacation for both students and teachers, after all. From time to time I meet a stray professor in the hallways and they tell me I do a good job, always working, always studying, always present. Then, they excuses themselves with "I have to change my car's windshield" and other such important matters and then disappear for days or weeks on end.

There's a big park with a lake nearby and a small river passes just behind the building. I often take small brakes from my academic life and stroll aimlessly. I sometimes watch the little fishes from the nearby bridge gathering in the shade of the willow trees. A kid approaches me one day, "Did you see the big one?" We chat a little. That's how I spend my days.

With three months left, I send Professor my thesis. Days later, he warmly congratulates me, "You are an embarrassment to our city!" I stand alarmed. "Yes, you are ruining the prestige of our University!" I move closer. He points out a paragraph in my thesis where "almost impossible" is heavily underlined in red. "Something is either possible or impossible," he mocks me with a noticeable grin on his face. I update the offending sentence. I also fix a few typos in the following week and rephrase some paragraphs which were not to his liking. He eventually approves it. I present it in front of the whole Department, the last step before facing the official commission. It gets approved.

My celebration is cut short a few days later. For some reason, it is of the utmost importance to have an actual, real-life experiment to confirm our theoretical results. "We can't present a theoretical thesis, we're a Technical University," Professor accuses me. I actually agree with him, though I have no soul left in this endeavor. How did he come up with this idea? I don't know. He probably got admonished by some higher-up. It was fine without it, the Department approved it, the Head approved it, it was ready for defending. Now it isn't. I shrug and accept it as another fact I can't understand nor influence.

Professor finds a public institution to lend us their watermelon-sized anechoic chamber for two hours. We visit the supermarket one morning to buy pork chops for the human head. I want to bring to Professor's attention that we're studying a dynamic system and not dead meat. But it's autumn 2012 already and the parks are in full color. It's way too late for any dialogue. I pull out a small plastic bag with a few miniature temperature sensors I bought the other day. Professor glues them to a metallic cylinder and inserts it in "the head." I see Professor was inspired by my way of handling the lack of real stents. I think it is a nail or wire of some sort but I'm not sure. Professor handles all the "sensitive equipment" himself. I take pictures and write down the results in a notebook. For the next two hours we gather temperature readings. I publish a paper with our findings shortly after, attach his name to it, update my thesis and everything is good again. I start to develop a faint feeling that I sleep better at night when I play along and nod approvingly to things I don't actually agree with instead of being pigheaded.

The final day is approaching. Mrs. B., from the Department of Doctoral Studies, informs me that I personally have to prepare and bring in food, drinks and coffee for the commission when I defend my thesis. I refuse. She insists. I point out that the University charges €1000 per student for the final show, that each member of the commission is actually getting paid for their trouble and that all these expenses plus transport and accommodation are already sponsored by our project. She shows signs of slowly winning back her memory. Mrs. B. also informs me that I won't be able to hold back my tears upon successfully defending my thesis in front of family, friends and colleagues. I successfully defend my thesis a few days later and I refuse her that pleasure, too.

We celebrate at a local restaurant with the whole Department and the commission of five professors that evening. I join out from politeness. There is not much science to celebrate. After dinner I shake hands with Professor and the Head. "He did make a lot of noise around here but he did a great job and has very nice results," the Professor praises me in front of the Head. I smile without saying anything. I leave the place and begin to think about the years ahead of me. But Professor catches up with me. He is a changed man, "Let's keep working together!" He is brimming with enthusiasm. I refuse him politely but he keeps talking as though my previous answer carries no weight with him, as he always does. "Yes, let's keep cooperating on new projects together," he goes on and on. I don't know what's gotten into him. Maybe he likes his name on new papers too much? He begins to get on my nerves. I answer respectfully with simple no's to all of his questions and proposals. I eventually say my goodbyes to him and turn my back. I leave Professor in the dark alley and my basement behind for good.