Overview of pm133 on PostgraduateForum.com

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Signup date: 08 Jan 2016 at 12:02am

Last login: 30 Mar 2021 at 8:40pm

Post count: 1246

pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From Mackem_Beefy:
A couple of points worth adding.

Firstly, I was self-funded (i.e. received no funding) for my original Masters in 1994.

Secondly, it's now very clear that if I don't undertake retraining, it's going to be very difficult for me to find meaningful employment.

Regards,

Ian

Going by your "mackem" user name I am assuming you are living in England (Sunderland?) so I can't comment on the loan situation south of the border.

I would say though that I disagree with your second point where you said - "Secondly, it's now very clear that if I don't undertake retraining, it's going to be very difficult for me to find meaningful employment."
Obviously certain careers might be out of reach but it's not necessarily true that you won't find any meaningful employment whatsoever without going through a Masters or a PhD.
Don't assume your first Masters or PhD are either obsolete or too specialised either.
You can very quickly brush up on the Masters stuff and the PhD brings a whole heap of generic skills.
Are you sure you have considered all the other options?

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Your thesis can contain whatever you like.
You are under no obligation to include everything you worked on.
That is true even if you have published work not mentioned in your thesis.
I personally omitted two papers from my thesis.
I referenced both of them as "published works" and mentioned that I had excluded them for to keep the thesis length reasonable and also because they didn't fit the story I wanted to tell.
You can only be questioned on things you have actually written about.

Your much bigger problem has been highlighted above.
Your supervisor WILL be caught. It may be today, next week or in 20 years but he will be caught and anyone who published alongside him will be in trouble.
This needs dealt with right now IMO.
You need to take proper advice now. I don't think anyone on here can really help you.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

If you search for "converting between bibliography formats" on Google you might find what you want.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From Tudor_Queen:
Hi pm133

I'm as chilled out and outgoing as ever! I just wasn't sure what to expect in this situation. I initiated some topics in the conversation, and so did she. I did let her take the lead in that I found out how she wanted to pitch the conversation. In the end it was a mixture of general/social chit chat and about our research. It was good to have met her, although right now I can't say I can see what is so good about this networking lark. I suppose it will pay off when I come to be looking for jobs and people will know me/my name.
.

The point of networking is to build relationships. It can take years to pay off. Most people make the mistake of being too promiscuous or too impatient.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From TreeofLife:
I don't think you can get it - it's too old to be online for this journal. Have you checked your library for a copy?

It is online.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Interlibrary loan?

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From haluong89:
Hi guys,
I am a student from Vietnam. I have a Master of Art at a University in Italy, where I graduated in 2015...After studying this master, I found my interest in doing research. I applied for many universities for PhD (count like more or less 15 unis). In 2015, I was rejected by 4 unis, in 2016 by 4 unis, one uni put me in a waiting list (they got 3 candidates but I was ranked 4), in 2017 this time I was rejected by 7 unis, there is one uni in Spain offering a slot in their PhD but without scholarship. Finally, I found a very big problem in my application is that:
- my master degree is not an academic master, it is a professional master so there is one of the reasons why I was declined.

So I am thinking of taking another master, I got the admission by a MSc program, but I am not sure it will help me or not. I think that maybe a Mres or MPhil could be better? Or maybe I will apply for the Phd in the US where students may not need the master to enter the PhD.

I am not quite sure at the moment. I feel that I am willing to give up just because I am going to be 28 in October and I am an Asian girl, people push me a lot on marriage.It is quite pressure and I really want to have a generous scholarship to finance my study in case I will study further. The MSc I mentioned above may provide me 6000 euro per year plus tuition fee and one more thing, it does not contain many research components, just coursework. So could you please give me some ideas?

I would like to add one other comment.
Do you want to get married? If not, are the people pressuring you members of your family?
Are they friends? Are you in a position to cut them out of your life if they won't listen to your needs?
I have daughters myself and I would never force my views on them regarding marriage, children, career choices, sexuality preferences etc. and it genuinely angers me to hear other young women being pressured in this way.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From l_e:
Ugh, this is literally keeping me up at nights. Viva went fine, everything's signed off on, but then a few days later as I was revising the dissertation I found an horrible error. My dissertation is basically qualitative political science; for one particular legal issue that I basically created the first comprehensive history of, I found out that it didn't end when I thought, and has been going on since with important stuff happening recently. If I hadn't caught it recently (and it was almost by pure chance that I did) I would have published this and destroyed my reputation right at the beginning of my career. The worst part is it was my "cheat" chapter -- basically it dealt with my prior professional field, so I don't even have the "newbie PhD" excuse. It doesn't change the central argument -- it actually supports it that these things have been happening -- but it just seems inexcusably careless.

Mentally I am having tremendous trouble dealing with this. I told my advisor but I don't think he gets the scope of this mistake. Another committee member who is closer to that issue probably will, though he's already signed off on it. It kind of takes a way a lot of the pride over finally getting the PhD. Anyone else ever deal with this kind of thing? I mean this won't (can't really) stop me from getting the degree, but now I feel like it's kind of a hollow victory.

To be honest, I think the bigger problem is passing stuff off from your previous professional work as part of your PhD unless you made that explicitly clear in your thesis. What you have described as a "cheat chapter" sounds totally unethical but I may be misinterpreting your words.
As for your error, if you go through life thinking that every error will ruin your reputation then you are going to be scared to take risks and will struggle professionally. Even the best people make mistakes. They are part of life and you need to learn to deal with making them.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From Auroracase:
Just wondering if anyone has any recent experience with getting a mortgage on a PHD stipend? Both myself and my partner are PHD students and we would love to buy but we have no idea if anyone will lend to us? We have a healthy deposit due to inheritance and know that going through a broker is probably our best bet but would love to hear from anyone who has looked into this recently?

Thanks
A

It would not surprise me if you were able to find someone willing to lend money to you in your situation but a word of caution. If mainstream lenders are all saying no, you should think very carefully about their advice.
After your deposit is paid, if you need to borrow less than 3 times your salary (not joint salary) and can survive interest rates of 5 or 6% then this is sensible. If you are relying on both you and your partner earning and/or need to borrow much more than 3 times your salary then you should be extremely careful. Negative equity, redundancy, pregnancy and a sudden increase in interest rates back to the historical norm of 5% are your big risks. Can you cope with these financial prudence stress tests?

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From Shaimaa:
Hello Pjlu,

Yes, I do not have resources on this topic. I took few online courses, read books about courage and fear...

This was Islamophobia!
Yes, someone must say it. I searched the internet desperately to read about it. I guess we are so scared to say it loudly.

In my country, people, social workers, physicolgists do not get it. Because it is not there .... they do not understand.....

So please share any useful reading about this topic.
What online counceling sites are there for my case?

I do apprciate your positive encouragement.

Thank you

If you don't mind me asking, how did they know you were a Muslim?

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From Tudor_Queen:
Thank you for the inspiration Nesrine! I think I am actually going to write a list of questions to ask/potential discussion points, so that if my mind goes blank I can initiate conversation! Hopefully she will be a chatty forthcoming kind of person herself to make it easier (I am quite outgoing but somehow feel she should take the lead as the senior person here!). Many thanks again and I will post an update on how it went!

Tudor

If you adopt an attitude that she should take the lead then you seriously risk either coming across as a star struck groupie or as awkward yourself.
Just relax and talk to her as an equal. You are both scientists. You will either get on or you won't.
You seem to be getting yourself a bit highly strung over this. Are you sure you are not making a bigger deal of this than it needs to be?
Why on earth would an outgoing person like you possibly need to make a list of topics to talk about? You will just come across as forcing things. Relax and enjoy chatting about all sorts of things. If you really do get tongue tied just ask her about her career. People love talking about themselves. If she is a functioning human being she will ask about your career.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From TreeofLife:
That's just people I know and what I see happening in my department. My field is molecular biology, but I see this with behavioural biologists and ecologists too - it takes a while to design studies and then get results. For ecology you may need results over several field seasons. For molecular biology you may spend years getting something to work.

Ah OK.I hadnt thought of that.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Since when did earning money become weird and why does it matter what other people think?
Unless you have a better option you surely need to be worrying more about putting food on your table than worrying about what people will think of you.

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Quote From TreeofLife:

I'd say most people in my area go into the viva with 0-1 papers. Very rarely will people have more than this, although they may have others in the pipeline as I did.

I am really surprised that it is rare to have more than that.
Which area are you in? Is there a particular reason for that?

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pm133 1246 posts
8 years ago

Some decent advice above but you simply cannot know how it will go until you get in there. Neither can you prepare much other than know exactly what you did during your PhD, why you did it, what else you considered and rejected, how your work fits in to other work in the field and how you have advanced the body of knowledge in this area.
The objective of a viva is to check you wrote the thesis and performed the work and that you have sufficient quality and quantity of work to justify the top award our education has to offer. In my opinion, a lot of people struggle in the viva because they have been put forward to viva with insufficient papers and this puts them at a very serious disadvantage. People do still pass with no papers but you make things very difficult.

If you have 2 or preferably 3 good papers where you are either first author or had a significant input and you have also written those papers then you should pass fairly comfortably.

Overview of pm133

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