The Good Old Days: When I was a Graduate Student

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Dear Readers,

   In hopes that I can give you a more personal view of my life, I thought I would write a little bit about how I came to be associated with the University of Constantinople.

   It was, for you, not too long ago that a younger, time-normal version of me moved to New York City to embark on a grand quest to become a famous scientist and save the world from great terrors.  At least, at the time I thought that was what I would do.  On the side, however, I made a litle money writing speculative fiction stories.  Sometimes when I go back to them I laugh.  The truth has ended up being so much stranger than any fiction I managed.

   At about the time that my career began to pick up, I received a most peculiar email.  It appeared to be from, well, me.  It puzzled me how someone could impersonate me with such accuracy, and over a period of time I convinced myself that I would indeed become a professor at a university one day.  Of course i assumed that this was all some elaborate prank or terrible hallucination, at first, but in the end I discovered it was all real.  Perhaps I will tell the full story another time.

  Dr. Skylar--me!--informed me that there would be many paths that I could go down, and many of them would lead to the University of Constantinople, but there would be many challenges as well and some versions of me would not answer the call.  He--I--felt assured, of course, that at least one of me would make the choice to join the University.  After all, we both knew he would never exist t contact me if it did not happen somewhere.

   The first step I had to follow was to go through the full undergraduate distance courses.  I continued to write speculative stories, but this time, my academic papers would sometimes substitute for a story here and there.  In many cases, this work seemed more outlandish and original than what I came up with on my own.  As I progressed, I began to gather a group of other writers who eventually became known as the Speculative Collective, a named devised by the multitalented Edward Joel Anderson.

   The Speculative Collective gave me a unique cover for my studies with the University.  As the years progressed, the most bizarre activities could be covered in the name of speculative fiction.  It was a great deal of fun, really!  And it set the stage for my future academic writings.

   Later on, I had to select a graduate adviser and a thesis topic.  Not being the narcissistic type, and concerned about spacetime's integrity (though later-me told me not to worry), I picked George Sphrantzes as my advisor and began to study the collapse of Empires and the dark ages that followed.  These became the topics of both my thesis and of several written projects.  My interest in these topics continues in my life at the University, and it has become (or really, has always been), a major focus on our department's research.

   Eventually, the time came for me to actually come to the University itself.  This is a complicated process that I will explain in detail some other time, as this post is more about my story than the complicated science involved in transmission of personality to outside time.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople