I handed in a draft while doing my history PhD thesis and said I thought it was “one of my best chapters” as I did so. One advisor, whom I admired immensely (idolized, really), read it and then sat me down and asked, “So, what exactly do you think a chapter is?”
Tweet your favorite diss while in grad school. Mine: I went to my mathematical logic professor for help understanding the proof of a complicated theorem. He replied: “Don’t feel bad, Scott. Even talented students have problems with this.”
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Wow, that’s rough.
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He also asked “You don’t get violent when you’re upset, do you?” (I’m from Brooklyn, he seemed worried.) It was the worst. A friend said he’d been through sth similar with the same prof and advised that I think of it in terms of “the pedagogical efficacy of shaming.”
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Do you think it was efficacious?
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To his immense credit, he immediately read that draft too. Then he sat me down again, said it was “much improved” and told me to put it down for two weeks and not look at it before trying again. 2/2
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Nice ending.
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I was very fortunate. Grad school didn’t break me, like it does so many others. There but for the grace...
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I got my first chapter back a bunch of times and thereupon confessed I didn't really feel like I knew what my advisor wanted. And he...confessed that he didn't really either. Strangely that helped a ton!
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ಹೊಸ ಸಂವಾದ -
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My first PhD supervisor in our very first meeting - he had no prior knowledge of me ‘I find when students come from other universities it takes a term or so of reading to bring them up to the level of those who have taken the Cambridge Tripos’
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I soon got rid of him!
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Smart move
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ಹೊಸ ಸಂವಾದ -
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First year Prosem, probably discussing Frege, or Russell. I, trying to fill the awkward silence after the prof asked a question about the reading, blurt out some nonsense. Prof looks at me and says “Right! And by right, I mean absolutely wrong.” Crushing.
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Sorry, but I just erupted into laughter
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It was classic, and I now look back on it fondly. But at the time? Ugh.
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Yeah, I get the “ugh”
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ಹೊಸ ಸಂವಾದ -
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Another grad student wrote on an undergrad paper: “I can’t believe a tree died for this”
- ಸಂವಾದದ ಮುಕ್ತಾಯ
ಹೊಸ ಸಂವಾದ -
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First practice job talk. Advisor gets up halfway through to walk out. Announces to room as he looks at me, shaking his head, “You have no idea how disappointed in you I am.” Fun times.
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Oh dear. That’s awful.
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It was that kind of program, and grotesquely it *helped* that I was used to that sort of thing by the time I was on the market. I would slit my wrists before subjecting grad students to that.
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Can we teach the same skills w/o crushing students? I think we can! I am sorry you had to go through that.
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