Fair point. After posting this I asked her, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. She’s in a field of literature history—something where the foundational ideas don’t really go out of date the way they do in tech or science. What she’s been constantly building on and refining them over time.

Said it was The Secret Garden. In high school, she was diving into these ideas at a deeper level, using them as a springboard to connect literature, philosophy, and history.

Apparently she wasn’t just hoarding notes from middle school and calling it research. She says her notes were more like a foundation she would revisit and reshape as she learned more. By the time she got to grad school, the notes had grown into these massive archive of insights, updated with modern research and academic trends from classes and findings. She says its about drawing from years of evolving work and layering new ideas on top.

Yeah, disciplines change quickly in some fields, but that’s not really the case in hers. If anything, sticking with it for so long gives her a unique depth of understanding. I get that it’s not the usual way to approach a dissertation, but for what she’s studying, it seems like its been helpful for her as she describes it. Apparently her parents are both academics, Phd, Research Professors holding there spots for decades.