I have been (mostly secretly) pursuing my doctorate for more than six years at the University of Oxford. Yesterday, I successfully defended my thesis and passed my viva. This morning was the first time I got to say to someone "so sorry but it's not Miss Wheeler, it's Doctor Wheeler."

My path here was beyond weird. Oxford rejected me three times between 2018 and 2020. Then a pandemic, Brexit, and a late third round of admissions at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford opened a door, and I matriculated over Zoom as a DPhil in Social Data Science from my little room in Seattle at 3 a.m in October of 2020.

My thesis uses classic machine learning methods at scale, with full transparency, to detect potential influence in text over time. It started with a question about whether Ada Lovelace ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and it ended up deep in Harold Bloom’s theory of influence. I presented the methods paper at Computational Models of Narrative in Madrid this year.

I also rowed for my college’s boat club (come on Linacre College, Oxford!!), went to more bops than I’ll admit to, and finally got to really, really love academia.

If school never fit you, and especially if you’re neuroatypical, you may just need to wait until you can do it on your own terms. I have failed out of or gotten kicked out of or dropped out of many more schools than I ever got a degree from. You can do it and just message me if you want to talk. There are more people than I could ever hope to thank in a single post, and I'll be writing more about them over the next weeks and months.

I did it my way.

The whole story is here: https://www.tarah.org/2026/11/10/i-got-a-doctorate-in-machine-learning-from-oxford-mostly-in-secret-over-the-last-six-years/

#Oxford #DPhil #MachineLearning #DigitalHumanities #DataScience