This Harvard student dropped a rap album as his final dissertation

Writing a dissertation is tough work – it’s a lot of writing, that. Lots of late nights, lots of Red Bull, lots of carpel tunnel, lots of stress and lots of not-going-out-for-like-four-months – I’m certainly not jumping at the chance to do it ever again.

But why, what a fool I was – why write my dissertation? Why not make a rap album instead and submit that? Genuinely a lot easier. That’s what bright spark Obasi Shaw did over at Harvard University: he wrote a 10-track mixtape called Liminal Minds, and then popped it in the in-tray in the office. Then he got an A- for it.

Here, you can listen to it below if you like (I would have given him a C+, but that’s cos the beats don’t bang hard enough, imho):

If there are, say, 400 words in a rap song, and 10 tracks on an album – that’s an average of 4,000 words. That’s quite a lot less than 20,000. And also, he didn’t even have to do the production – he out-sourced it. This guy’s doing uni right.

To be honest, I’m pretty annoyed I didn’t think of this first. My wicked Italian Neoclassical and 19th-century art-themed mixtape would have been ??????