Jouri

You seem to be painstakingly negative about every aspect of academia, be it the developing a PhD proposal (and indeed 'hot' is a word used by the ESRC about certain topics on its website), the life of the postdoc, or the life of a lecturer. Do you think you would find any other area of work more exciting? I don't think its helpful to try and sap every ounce of enthusiasm out of someone considering a PhD, simply because you personally don't enjoy research.

I understand your point and I certainly don't want to depress enthusiastic "beginners" through my comments. I just feel that there is a lot of dishonesty involved in people recruiting for PhD research and academia. It certainly doesn't help those who start if they think it's all as nice as it looks on the package or job description.

Quite frankly, the years of research have made me tired, bitter, and lonely - of course I'm thinking about an exit. I'm sure I'm not the only one who shares similar experiences. I'm not a quitter, that's the only reason why I was still hanging around to complete the job.

Congratulations to those who are still happy and good luck to the new beginners. Jouri is out.

Jouri
=====
Your input was showing another side of the story. What gone wrong with you? Every phD workers are not so depressed.

To be honest I think its good to have someone like Jouri on here, adding the 'other side of the coin'. For example, I tend to LOL when I read things like 'if you keep trying you'll get there" and the like from the more 'optimistic' members of the forum (if only it were that easy). Jouri provides some much needed realism in this respect, and accordingly I hope will keep posting.

Just want to say: I did a Ph.D in computer science 10 yrs ago and it was brilliant and has been fantastic for my career.

It was very hard at the time, in particular I remember a very bad moment when I was writing up when I suddenly realised that one set of results was totally invalid because of a flaw in my maths, implemented faithfully in perfect but wrong c++. This was the week before I went to start a new job in industry and it basically added six months to my degree while I redid everything and rewrote to account for the actual results rather than the rubbish I had generated before.

This is what happens in Ph.D's there is no sunny, easy path, but at the end it is worth it.

Crickey did i post that long ago :P.

Well considering I'am starting one of those topics i mentioned it is all and good now, hopefully Jorges had the same success.

Luckily one of my project colleagues has written on over 20+ languages so that is always a good thing :)

Regards Wolfe

nowadays the hot topic is SOFTWARE ENGINEERING MODELS. :-)