Do you know something, we don't DanB? You the new man?

ha ha

Submitted in fact is what you do when you get near your PhD. You write it all up in a big document and then you submit it.

Maybe she has submitted

Oh and I also went on a course which encourage supervisors to be nice to students and told us never to tell students that they are wrong.

Yes but I have laughed for all the other ones too.. applied to Indians, Muslims, Welsh, Engineers and so on.

A PhD is supposed to be a focused project we finish in 3 years. Chicken breast seems to be small enough for a mini-project.

I am pretty sure, I have seen these jokes applied to almost every human pigeon holes around. So they can't be unique definitions.

I know I am wasting my time with this thread but it is gotten so amusing now! I almost wish I could meet Zara. I could invite Stu and we could all go down and do a mini-project on chicken breast with help from Fluffy.

I don't go around with many BNP party members but it is only because they don't like me. I don't go around with many artists either but that is because I don't get to meet many in my line of research/life. I don't go around with many people with kids because they don't like to go to the same places I want to.

During my industrial placement, I rented out a room with an old couple in South England. The landlord was a security guard and the landlady worked in one of the shop that make cross-stich patterns. They were also very appreciative of my career, respected my opinions, smart enough to be tolerant, had common sense and treated me like a daughter.

Everyone is judgemental and biased to an extent. It is human nature but literacy is supposed to teach you to be tolerant and respectful. However literacy is not the only way to become a brilliant person so using that to judge the standards of other people is flawed methodology.

I put so much more effort into him though. I have two other guys and they are brilliant and sometimes teaches me a thing or two. One of the other two guys is actually the brother of the one I am complaining about. It just seems like I could have spent my time to write a chapter in my thesis instead of bothering to help this one undergradute to such length and realise that in the end nothing got through!

I can understand how some professors I know treat their undergraduate like dust. For instance one of the professors won't see his student even if the student is 1 minute late to the meeting or if the student did not solve a problem assigned to him in the last meeting.

I don't want to become that kind of academic but it really does seem like the best way to go now. If the student doesn't care, why should we?

I met with a student I am co-supervising yesterday. He gave me the first draft of his final year undergraduate project report. He was meant to collect data from experiments and analyse them. In the end it turned out that he had conducted one experiment (one subject) and run a visual abstraction on the data (the number goes up) and written it up as a statistical result and proof of concept!

This is the sort of thing that makes me not want to be an academic. I can't count the number of times, we had told him of the importance of ecological validity. How do you deal with undergraduates who just don't want to put in the effort?

I talked to the course administrator and in her experience, apparently some undergraduates aim for a C and are happy with it even when they are capable of doing more. Is that true? I would have thought that the undergraduate project is something you choose based on your interest and therefore reflect you at your best.

I like this one:

How to Get a PhD: A Handbook for Students and Their Supervisors ~Estelle Phillips, Derek S. Pugh

Well sometimes you can take the girl out of the place that gave her issues but not the issues out of the girl. Just leave her be. A person this fixed upon the same argument, despite a huge number of others telling her she is warped, is obviously not open to opinions different to her own at this time.

Are we ever really focused on our PhDs?

My parents are both degree holders but they worked very hard to get there. Like DanB's and many other people's parents, they started planning for the expenses my academic life would make as soon as I was born. I was not allowed to watch TV for more than an hour a day and was encouraged to read a lot and work hard at my education and get summer jobs during my undergraduate degree. However since we lived in west Africa before my undergraduate, they also taught me to remember that I am very lucky to have the life I was given and not to look down on people just because they have had a different upbringing and have different opinions due to their experiences or situation.