no, it's too dark at christmas, the days are too short. i am looking forward to more light!

BB, no, i haven't finished my PhD yet. still, i was speaking from some sort of experience (different, but in some ways similar). the moment of submitting, or the final viva, can be very anticlimactic, i agree. but later, after a few days or weeks, in my experience a quiet, but strong satisfaction and pride can set in. it is a very personal thing, as i tried to indicate. the "PhD" is maybe not so important. but you know very well what devils you had to fight, what crises you had to overcome, all the battles you fought on the way... the pride in overcoming all these very personal obstacles is not easily shared. but you can feel it nonetheless.
and, thinking about that future feeling, now when i am struggling with these personal obstacles, does sometimes help me to keep going. which is why i thought to share it with chris. knowing of course, that it won't work for everyone.

i, on the other hand, have often profited a lot from the other PhD students in my centre/department. we have fun together, which is important - we have sometimes gone to conferences together or presented papers together - and we run reading groups and informal roundtable sessions which are a huge help to test your ideas and discuss issues important to you with people who understand where you are coming from. also, it is inspiring to see them all working so hard and motivates me to get to work, too; and it is great when someone completes an important step (like an upgrade, or PhD viva, etc.)
i think i would be quite desparately unhappy if i didn't have my PhD friends!

my uni's SU-run internet radio.

chris, sometimes i just want to give up my PhD, too. not to go find elk anywhere, though, but perhaps just to get pregnant, have kids and be a stay-at-home housewife.

all i can say is - keep going. it will all start making sense sometime. and you will be sooooo proud of yourself once you've got that PhD!!! because only you will know exactly how hard it was.

do you know the expression of an "academic question"? often used in connection to something that once seemed relevant, necessary to know - but then it turns out that you do not need to know in order to make the decision at hand. so then the question is "academic" in that it might well be an interesting question, in itself, but of no use.
so that would be where my "definition" of an academic position comes from. an academic research position is where you do research for no particular reason apart from it being interesting, and wanting to expand knowledge (not saying that this can't later lead to useful products). a non-academic research position would be a job where you do research in order to make a profit, for example.
with the privatisation and marketisation of education and research, the distinction is however quite blurry these days.

congratulations CC!!!
I have a slight hangover myself as one of my friends is Dr. since yesterday, too, and the celebrations were extended

well done!

check out www.ukcosa.org.uk

pamw, i think what you are describing is not unusual. at my uni, all GTAs had to take some uni-wide courses on "teaching" which were actually not too bad. but obviously they did not touch the content. concerning content, it's the department that has to be active - and it depends very much on individual people.

i felt let down a bit by the department too at one point, and tried to take it up with the according people. however that was to no avail and i stopped bothering. somewhat disillusioned, i realised that the department does not really care about the teaching. so now i just do my job, and where failures of the department result in bad teaching on my part, well then the students just get bad teaching. i'm sorry for the students, but i can't solve the institutional problems that no one else cares about. not on that pay, anyway.

i hate those sentences too - they make me feel dumb.

located the liminal geospacial hermenutics of hegemony
located: found out where they are
liminal: refers to boundaries, borders
geospacial: referring to space, but not just any, rather, geographical space
hermeneutics - roughly, interpretations
so: you have found out where the geographical boundaries of interpretations of hegemony are? or something like that

in russia, at least formerly, it was indeed so, that the heater was either on or off and no regulation was possible. people got used to that. i lived with a russian friend (outside of russia) for a long time and he tended to walk around nearly naked in a totally overheated house - it was hard to get him used to the notion that you don't take all your clothes off as soon as you come inside, but instead don't put the heater up all the way.

cc, your's is tomorrow, right? good luck!!!!!
let us all know how it went!

umm i'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'teach in english', as surely you are aware that you won't be 'taught' your PhD? or do you mean re own teaching opportunities?

i know that most swiss universities will let you submit your PhD in english.
in order to teach, you would however have to get at least a basic grasp of the local language.

juno, i never realised we're the same age! although i won't be 31 much longer...
i knew it was going to be like this, but i am still surprised sometimes at just how young PhD students often are in this country. i think it is more likely the status and/or the workload of doing a PhD, rather than age, that makes "us" behave in a more mature way than undergrads...