Dear Lord...surreal....

Wow..... just wow.

I was not expecting such a response from my reply. Considering the (mostly) seemingly vicious comments generated over the weekend, my original statement concerning the 'tribulations' associated with PhD life seem validated.

Lighten up.

I'd read a post by one other user here (his name alludes me) which asked people to stop bitching about the PhD process. I wholeheartedly concurred with these sentiments. Yes, everyone has a different and unique situation. This, however, does not warrant the avalanche of threads on this website primarily concerned with problems/hardship/general despondency.

There appears to be a lack of threads professing the positives associated with PhD life.

I, for one, have had far more :-) than :-(

That is all,

Adieu,

Tommy

Tommy, we were having a bit of light hearted banter - nothing was meant as viscious - I also teased Bug and she thought it was funny, sorry you took it so seriously and were offended.

Your original post said nothing about the positive aspects of PhD life, or about your regret about what you seem to see as alot of unecessary moaning: it took a condescending tone about those people who had experienced relationship difficulties which were exasperated by their PhD commitments.

It must be wonderful to have glided through this process with ease, however, do spare a thought for those people for whom completing a PhD is rather like climbing Mount Everest: wonderful, exhilerating, the experience and achievement of a life time and beautiful but also hazardous (financially and in terms of relationships) and exhausting.

So if you want to announce some of your joyful PhD experiences I'm sure we'd all like to hear about it, but please don't take the tack of putting down those who need to vent and find mutual support in order to get through this process. Many people who use this forum find it an invaluable way of getting through, they're not just moaning for the sake of it.

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I personally would not ever consider myself to have any authority to be able to say this above! Perhaps I am much too humble and thankfully so!
What do you mean by general despondency? A phd is tough. It is fun. It is lovely. It is hard. We have financial battles where we count pennies to fill out internatonal tuition fees and compromise a social life and sometimes moan about it to friends.

We get nice papers published, nice conferences, words of praise and when they happen we often do not find the time to type on a forum, we go to a pub.

We come here, for here we are anonymous, here we have fellow travellers who identify with the trials. That is not general despondency.

I need not have taken this up, for Eska below has outined the issues beautifully, but your sentence on how something does not warrant a load of threads on general despondency, has regrettably angered me!

Congratulations on being the smooth sailor you;ve been. But no thanks. we moaners here, are richer, by experience, a thousand times.

People do not usually use message boards to share joy with the world or talk about how marvellous their lives are.

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I've played my part in producing 3 kids during my Phd so I'm not doing too bad...