What is a Ph.D. / The Ph.D. Game :-)
Quickly, I notice some old links I threw up years ago don't work anymore to my Ph.D. blog and also the Ph.D. game. Basically, my ISP scrapped the web-space on which it was stored. I know one or two found the blog especially useful at the time I posted it up, explaining what a Ph.D. is either to potential candidates or to relatives. The questions listed are pitched at a basic level I have encountered over the years.
My blog is now at:
http://www.geocities.ws/high_temp_wear/
The Ph.D. Game, meant at the time as a mickey take of the Ph.D. experience, can now be found as a PDF at:
http://www.geocities.ws/high_temp_wear/phdgame.pdf
or as a jpg file at:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EgxCcMUXgAA19P2?format=jpg&name=small
The latter is an upgrade of one originally found on the University of Cambridge website. Beware square 39, which shouldn't be taken too seriously. :-)
If the Geocities link is blocked, I'm possibly looking at converting the website to a PDF for uploading to an accessible cloud space at some point in the future.
The second link to the Ph.D. Game (jpg) should be accessible.
Ian
Hi Mackem,
I have just read bits of your blog and I think it is quite informative. I think it would have helped me if I read something like that before my PhD.
I actually played that PhD board game! In one of the bigger labs someone brought in and I think 6 or 7 PhD students started playing it. It was quite causual but we are all progressing at roughly the same speed. I think there was 4 of us on 39+ and we were getting quite competitive, joking who would finish their PhD first. Until one guy overthrew the dice and it ended up stuck under a fume hood. Of course we tried to recover the dice but it was to no avail. So in the end we didn't finish the game or our PhDs. I just thought I should share that random story.
Hi Mackem,
I have just read bits of your blog and I think it is quite informative. I think it would have helped me if I read something like that before my PhD.
I actually played that PhD board game! In one of the bigger labs someone brought in and I think 6 or 7 PhD students started playing it. It was quite causual but we are all progressing at roughly the same speed. I think there was 4 of us on 39+ and we were getting quite competitive, joking who would finish their PhD first. Until one guy overthrew the dice and it ended up stuck under a fume hood. Of course we tried to recover the dice but it was to no avail. So in the end we didn't finish the game or our PhDs. I just thought I should share that random story.
That aptly describes how we all feel with about a year to go. I think the Ph.D. Game was originally designed, just like a Ph.D., to be extremely difficult to finish. There was an earlier version and the extra squares added, especially later, seem to be to cover the full set of frustrations towards a Ph.D.'s end. Everything seems to push to towards square 33 and a proper job and you being virtually unemployable in the real world should you gain a Ph.D.
I think square 39 might have been comedy based on an urban legend as a few years later, I did hear an unsubstantiated story along the same lines.
This location should be safe from deletion if ISPs change.
https://ia601507.us.archive.org/35/items/phdgame/phdgame.pdf
Ian
