I probably would have thought this guy sounded cool if I didn't know him at U.Va. to be a complete asshole. Edmundson was one of the professors on my orals committee and was nice enough to tell someone I knew at a cocktail party that I "could have been better prepared." Dick. Not that I hold a grudge or anything (course, the person I knew could have been nice enough not to repeat it to me, but that's a post for another day).

Also, he was widely hated among the graduate students for being an arrogant douche. He had one of those hard-nosed attitudes like, "Prove to me how smart you are," the academic version of machismo. And in fact, he told me before my orals that when he was in grad school he was looking forward to them because he wanted to show his professors how smart he was. Now, it occurs to me that he might have, in his own way, been trying to reframe the whole ordeal for me as a chance to prove myself, rather than the opportunity for a massive fuckup, but it didn't come across that way: instead, it sounded like an opportunity to relive his own triumphalist grad school narrative at my expense. Also, I was clinically depressed, I believe noticeably so, and suffering from severe social anxiety, ESPECIALLY when talking to professors, so the advice to show how I had the Right Stuff fell even flatter. I repeat: dick.

Anyway, Mark, you asshole, thank you for contributing in a particularly memorable way to the seven-year-long nightmare that was my time at U.Va.