Overview of pm133

Recent Posts

Am I the only one at fault?
P

Quote From Kynaras:
Thank you for the replies.

As tough as it is to admit, the situation is my fault and I am sorry if I came across as trying to blame my supervisor for not having done my work. While I do feel that she has not performed her duties as a supervisor, my current situation is indeed of my own making.

I am finally putting in the hard work needed to finish my proposal and hope a late submission will be accepted, even if it means receiving a penalty.

Thank you for the honest opinion ToL and thank you Tudor Queen for the measured advice.


I am normally a very harsh critic of people as regards this sort of thing but in this case I think you deserve a lot of credit for appearing to immediately accept you were entirely to blame. The easier route would have been to blame the supervisor and you opted not to do this.
As others have said, if you had kept to your timescales then you would always have a case if things went against you because you contacted the right people early in the process. This has been a tough lesson for you but it sounds like you have genuinely learmed from it. You will almost certainly have to call on this experience again in your career and next time you will nail it. In my career it is the things which go wrong like this which build our experience and make us do special things when it really matters.
I made far worse mistakes as a young man. You will be fine.
What you need now, is to get everything submitted and pray for a slice of luck. Start working on your charm offensive.
Let us know how you get on and good luck.

Postgrad Forum Hall of Fame
P

Quote From chickpea:
Congratulations to both of you!


Quote From Pjlu:
Congratulations DrnPM133 and Dr Muspectrum, fantastic news for you both. Hope the celebrations went well and best luck for the future!


Thanks to both of you.
My minor corrections were completed and submitted last weekend.
I can honestly say that waiting on these corrections being approved is the worst part of my PhD by some distance.
I have heard nothing yet, not even acknowledgement of receipt of the corrected thesis. According to my supervisor the process will take as long as it takes.
Given that I like to be in comtrol, this is absolute torture and it has only been 4 days lol.
Having nightmares about the changes not being accepted.
Would be interesting to see if others experienced delays in getting a response.
I am settled on an expectation of one month now. No idea if that is realistic.

Mental health discrimination
P

Missy, there are only two people whose opinions count. Yours and your supervisors.
8f your supervisor is happy you should feel free to block everyone else out totally.
At my uni we were told by a range of miscellaneous idiots that we had to attend this seminar or that talk etc. I ignored them all. Someone emailed me asking why I wasnt attending seminars and copied my supervisor on the email. Essentially an attempt to land me in it. I emailed the person back with a terse response "I am unavaliable to attend these seminars" and copied my supervisor. Nobody gets to bully me:-) Didnt receive another message like that again.
You may not feel like it but you probably need to learn very quickly how to say No in a firm way to people or they will simply take the piss. You need to able to do it without being aggressive though.
Saying No feels fantastic because it gives you back control of your life. Something I suspect you feel you dont have which may be contributing to your problems. By the way, I would just say No to doing the presentation. They are hardly going to sack you. They NEED you to pass your viva because it looks terrible if you dont. They are also hardly likely to carry you up on stage and force you to talk. You have the control here. Feel free to start exerting it and feel the joy of No.

Oh and this is YOUR PhD. You have the right to decide what hours you work. Your co workers are irrelevant. Honestly I would laugh if anyone asked me that. My response would be that i couldnt honestly give two f**ks. As for working in industry you can deal with that as and when you get there. Industry is NOTHING like a PhD. I agree with the 9 to 5 bit although that is my personal choice. Unless there is a very good reason you really need to lfeel free to work whatever hours you want.

Great project, mediocre uni...
P

I will never ever understand this obsession with university rankings.
The project is perfect, the location is perfect so I dont understand the issue.
Do you honestly want to work in an industry where they are daft enough to award jobs based on what uni you went to anyway rather than treating you on your own merit?
IMO university rankings are as useless as journal impact factors when considering almost anything of merit.
Ludicrous academic obsession with both is a large part of why I am getting out as soon as my corrections are finished.
Phew. Glad I got that off my chest :-D

Others may give you a calmer response lol.

Interview task on 'strategies to boost recruitment'. Any tips
P

Quote From fallenonion:
Hi All

In just over a week, I've got what will now,be my second interview for a job in HE. To give my background I'm an FE lecturer / manager with a masters, trying to find work in a university education department. I had an interview a few weeks ago which was a disaster as it wasn't quite right for me due to my lack of research experience. Now I've got another one which is less research-y but there seems to be more emphasis on the business side of things and they want ten minutes on how I would boost recruitment to their courses. I used to,work in marketing so have some ideas about targeting different audiences through multi-channel communications - web, pr, social media, open days, etc etc. But I just feel like it's all stating the obvious. Any one got any tips / ideas what they be after?

Thanks.


You cannot answer that without understanding the unique selling point of that university.
I would ask what would make ME choose them.
When you answer that you will find everything else falls into place.
It sounds to me that you are approaching this back to front.
If I was interviewing you I would want you to demonstrate that you understood what you were trying to sell before you tried to sell it. Otherwise how can I trust that your ideas are not just an expensive waste of time?

Postgrad Forum Hall of Fame
P

Passed viva on Thursday 11th May 2017 with minor corrections which should only take a day or two to fix. I will probably be a week too late with my final corrected thesis to graduate for the summer but will be happy enough to graduate in November.

For those who are still in the middle of their PhDs I will post elsewhere on my experience of the process and also why I have decided to turn down a postdoc opportunity and quit academia. I found it helpful to read the experience of others so will be happy to return the favour.

Very very happy.

Work place problem
P

Quote From Kahn:
Hahaha! Sorry I am not laughing at your situation but rather I was thinking of posting something similar just last night. I work in an office environment with three other PhD students. While the individual in question is definitely not as hard working as your colleague, I have slowly started to get very irritated by having them around. Whatever discussion we may be having almost always seems to get diverted somehow to them putting forward ridiculous conspiracy theories or just utter rubbish with no facts to back them up. And the thing is that you could walk in to the office and start a conversation about things as diverse as last nights football match to dating and the conversation would almost always get diverted to their ridiculous ideas.

The other thing is that the person is also quite intrusive. I could walk into my office one day and see things on my desk moved about and they even admitted to "checking out" my research. Also, it seems impossible for me to sit in peace and quiet to focus on my research as they're always talking or interrupt my research and guess how? By coming up right behind my back and staring at what I am reading. It pisses me off so much when I can feel the person looking from right above me. The fact that they're not too hygienic and love to make physical contact only makes matters worse.

I don't think moving offices would be an option so for the past week I have been using the campus library which isn't as ideal as having your own office space....


Now this is a different scenario altogether.
I would mercilessly butcher anyone who touched my stuff and I would be very blunt about them invading my personal space. There is a time for being diplomatic and there is a time to "bring the thunder" lol :-D

Work place problem
P

To be honest it sounds very much like you are jealous because he works harder and is more successful than you.
You really need to urgently get on top of your own problems. Once you get yourself in a better mental place you will find this jealousy will simply disappear. The alternative is that you let it poison you.
Have you considered how he feels about you?

Frequency of feedback from supervisor
P

Quote From Hanginthere:
Quote From muspectrum:
Beginning to wonder if Hanginthere and I share the same supervisor as I had the same problem. I got R and R and the stress of this, the massive resubmission fee and full-time job led me to just not being contactable/not reminding him of stuff for an entire month. Then he wondered if I was still alive and all was sorted...until the post office lost my thesis after the uni sent it to examiners, but thats another story.

So, not ideal, but maybe just the silent treatment will work?

That must have been very frustrating. I don't have a job, so you can imagine that I go through a period of two months of doing nada.
I try to continue with research and lit review, just not getting anywhere with setting a timeline for feedback.
I do not want to make an official complaint, so I guess I have to continue to manage until I submit next year (likely June).

I appreciate your feedback and wish you all the best.

On a positive note, I guess he is helping me identify the sort of academic I do not want to be.


Inhad a friend once who paid another academic to review her thesis because she was sick to death of the lack of urgency of her own supervisor. Is this an option for you?

I am not sure what I am going through !!!
P

Excellent advice from pjlu.
Your PhD has absolutely nothing to do with gratifying this supervisor because you cannot control how other people feel about you.
It is about getting what YOU want out of it. After all, you are going to have to sell this puppy in job interviews for years to come.
Make your own mind up about how you want to expand your research ideas and start caring less about what this one unsupportive person expects of you.
It might be time for you to stop seeing this supervisor so often. Stop worrying about getting his approval and take charge of your own immediate future. You will feel more in control that way.
There are plenty of us out there who actively avoid overly involving our supervisors in our work. I know one guy who actively refused to give his supervisor unsolicited requests for progress updates and is now a professor himself. He used to tell his supervisor "When I have something to publish you will be the first to receive the manuscript". I would never go that that length but I certainly need my space.

Good luck.

Finding this whole PhD thing really hard...
P

Quote From yrc202:
This is my first time posting on a forum and I could really do with some advice. I'm in my second year of doing an ESRC-funded PhD and am really struggling with it. I'm not behind with work and I'm steadily plodding along, but I'm feeling more and more miserable about it. I'm struggling with the lack of direction, routine and the constant need to try and motivate myself to work. I'm in the social sciences and don't really have much supervision (once a month meetings where I'm usually told to just carry on with what I'm doing). There is zero research culture at my university which makes it hard/pretty impossible to meet other postgrads in my department. I feel really lonely and have lost so much self-confidence/self-esteem.

I've been searching forums for months about quitting, I wake up and go to sleep looking for a job that would employ me either with/without a PhD to research options, I cry most days. I've struggled with depression and anxiety throughout my Masters and PhD. I'm on medication and having counselling. I took an interruption for 6 months of my first year and worked for a research charity. I found a lot of self-confidence doing a job but realised during this time I didn't want to work in research. I missed doing my PhD though, so came back to it.

I know there is a lot of discussion on here about people who have felt the same during their PhDs and it's been comforting reading and knowing I'm not the only one. I'm just wondering how people either: (1) managed to get through their PhDs whilst struggling with mental health difficulties? (2) find the courage to leave?

Any advice would be much appreciated.


The good news is that you already know the answer to this.
You left the PhD, did some volunteering and your life sounded great again.
Having realised you were happy to leave research you then made the odd decision to go back to the PhD and now you are miserable again.
IMO you should ditch the PhD and go back to what was making you happy again.
A PhD is not for everyone. Pressing ahead for years with something which makes you this miserable simply is never worth it because you risk ending up broken and that would be a real shame.

In love with my gay supervisor and emotionally drained
P

If your supervisor is gay then he wont be interested in you regardless of how good looking you think you are (I am referring to the strange sentence where you felt the need to tell us you were good looking and a former model).
IMO you need to stop spending so many "hours getting ready" and accept that you cant always have what you want.
Dating a supervisor who DOES want you would be bloody stupid anyway.

Anyone met their examiners before viva?
P

Quote From appleby:
Thank you for all your suggestions. Yes, in the UK we're advised against having any form of communication with the examiners, it's pure luck if you happen to have met them somewhere before the viva - which is totally different from the American practice. Well, 3 more days to go before my viva and I am not really sure whether I am up to it!

Good luck.
My turn the week after you.
I feel exactly the same way as you do.

Invite co-authors for a personal project? When to invite, when to work alone?
P

Quote From Tudor_Queen:
Unless you were going to ask them to contribute with some specific expertise - e.g., to do the statistical analysis/part of it.

I would have thought that your supervisor would make that call.

What is your idea of a draft paper?
P

Quote From Tudor_Queen:
Rightiho. Thanks. I am going to aim for complete but if anything is missing or I don't have time to proofread or whatever I will notify them. I am asking the question partly as one of my supervisors commented that I was a perfectionist... I thought, hmmm... do they want a REAL draft then? I may ask what she means if it comes up again.


I would very much recommend you do not tell your supervisor that you didnt proof read something you sent because you "dont have time". The inference is that you think your time is more valuable than theirs. Now that may be true but I wouldnt actually say it :-)