lundi, janvier 07, 2008 Higher Education: The Horror Movie Apparently, there are help groups out there for struggling/ strangling/ dying grad students.Simon Wolff offers some warnings to would-be (science) PhD candidates, which I wish I'd read before taking this endeavour on. Had I read Myshele Goldberg's piece on procrastination earlier, I might have avoided the pitfall that I find myself in right now - lots of work to do, no motivation to actually get it done, and deadlines looming like nobody's business. Richard Butterworth offers some constructive criticism of the support that postgraduate students receive from their institutions (i.e. NONE), and urges all grad students to not take it lying down. He also advises: "The only way to find out how to do a PhD is to do one. Therefore, all advice is useless." Brilliant man. It is very telling that his page is titled: "I did a PhD and did NOT go mad." He also offers a link to Diana Bental's "Delaying Higher Degree Completion", which is interesting reading fodder, especially if you're procrastinating. It gives advice to supervisors - like mine, who obviously wrote the book on it. In counterpoint to this is the very heartfelt article from an anonymous PhD student (presumably discovered by Connell, whom the article is attributed to), which writes: "At the core of the project is an intellectual relationship between student and supervisor. If this relationship works well, the result is not just that the student learns particular ideas or techniques from the supervisor. (Indeed that need not happen at all - I can think of several theses where I contributed little technically.) There can be a shared intellectual development in which both parties gain some new perspectives and the result of their joint labour is some public gain in knowledge."In an amusing, but horrifyingly true twist, Gina Hiatt lists five types of supervisors from hell:
My new years' wish for higher education in Singapore is that they take a page out from UK's movement to train professors to function as supervisors. No more crap idiots who don't care! [Higher Education: The Horror Movie] |
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