211
First, “thanks for letting me know” is not an unambiguous no. I suppose most people would actually get it, but she already appears to have boundary issues, so you should make it much clearer. The best thing to do would be to make it clear to her that you consider her propositions to be out of line. You can add, that while you don't think badly of her because ...
136
tl;dr: Although it is possible to have Brexit without British science suffering, this would require meaningful political support, and there is little to suggest that this will be forthcoming in the near future.
A recent report by the Royal Society provides some context. This report is focussed on the British research sector as a whole, rather than on ...
132
I agree with you. I feel the request to put your salary on a slide (on the first slide, no less!) is rather unexpected, and quite frankly does not speak highly about the professionalism of your contact. I would decline this, for multiple reasons:
Your salary is nobody's business. Not sure what more there is to say about this.
Students are, for the largest ...
107
Legally, you can't be made to sign a retrospective, retroactive contract.
Professionally, if your supervisor or the university person responsible for the CASE studentships decided to be obnoxious about it, they could make the completion of your PhD uncomfortable.
As long as you don't need the CASE money or the on-site experience, this looks like a useless ...
105
Your initial reaction was thanks for letting me know, now can you answer the question about how to calculate the standard deviation.
This answer is ambiguous and at risk for misunderstanding. I guess you mean no, but you're not saying no. If taken literally, this answer says neither yes nor no. Myself, earlier in my life, would have interpreted thanks for ...
88
I think you should be worried that you and your colleagues might have to go without pizza the rest of the semester if you've already (unknowingly) burned through the budget, and not much else.
You could also worry that in the future you'll have to go through a more formal approval process, which will probably loosen once whoever is involved in the approval ...
71
I wrote a pretty extensive response on this a little while ago: here and also this may be slightly relevant.
The short version is: Because they can be, and because they have to be. UK universities make money off international students; their funding is limited, and it is designed to go to domestic or European students. The funding bodies will only fund ...
70
The employing professor will not have access to this data.
You can omit anything in this form.
The data from this form goes to HR and is aggregated there so they can prove to auditing bodies that the staff distribution is not skewed (i.e. that they are not discriminating on basis of whatever)
65
In addition to the practical, and very important answers that others have already given I will make this point about the emotional impact.
I'm a UK citizen in academia, but a lot of my colleagues, collaborators and students (both UG and PG) are from the EU. Before the Brexit vote they had almost exactly the same rights as me to live and work in UK academia. ...
58
There's nothing you can do to change your grade on a completed degree. What you can do is do well in your job so that no one cares about your old grades, which it sounds like you've done. So congrats on that! The real issue here isn't your grades, it's that you're still feeling a lot of anxiety about your college experience. I'd suggest talking to a ...
53
Absent plagiarism, fraud, or other academic sanction, it would be difficult to revoke an awarded degree. There would have to be strong evidence for doing so, and it’s not often attempted, in part because of the likelihood of legal action.
So, I would normally say don’t worry about it. However, in a dysfunctional department, anything could happen, and you ...
53
Interviewing a family member is not permitted. Yes, you should raise a complaint. Do it politely, of course. But in the end, you have to ask yourself whether or not a work group that would even try to get away with this is one you want to get involved with.
51
I would ask about having a co-supervisor. Having access to esteemed DL researchers is great -- but they will have limited time/interest in helping you if you are not "formally" their student. If you manage to find someone in this role, I think your position is just about perfect.
If you don't manage to find someone in this role, I have three main concerns:
...
48
So far, I have only come across one reason for needing something close to administrator rights on a fixed department machine: using scientific software.
When you start using a new scientific piece of software, you often have its source code, and need to build it first. Typically, there is no documentation of what exact packages in your Linux distribution ...
48
The EU organises and funds programmes such as Horizon 2020, the Erasmus programme, and Erasmus Mundus. None of those can be replaced by the UK government in isolation.
On a personal note. Why do I feel so strongly? I am a Dutch citizen and presently a postdoc in England. I have personally benefitted tremendously from freedom of movement and from all ...
47
No.
Such action should be the very, very last resort, and only undertaken if you have taken legal advice on whether it is advisable to do so.
As a UK student, you should have support available to you from the Student Union, which will almost certainly include disability representation.
The Student Union will be able to advise you on how to proceed on this ...
46
Andrew mostly covered why this is administratively impossible, but I think it's also worth addressing the misunderstanding of what a Ph.D. is embedded in this question. Pete Clark said it better than I can, but Ph.D.'s are not merit badges. More is not better. Getting a Ph.D. on one of these topics will not stop you from working on the other. Working ...
46
On a generic CV, I would simply make a section of "Graduate students supervised and co-supervised", and include this student. In this context it wouldn't be necessary to go into detail about whether the supervision was "to completion".
But for something like a promotion dossier, where you're asked to tick boxes, I would go to whoever is responsible for ...
44
No. The class of a degree is not written in your post-nominal qualifications. You can add it in he educational details on your CV.
39
You seem to be operating on the assumption that "I have my own funding, therefore, I can go wherever I want". That is simply not true. Taking on a graduate student is not only a matter of money, it is also a significant investment of time on the part of the advisor and believe me, at top departments, time is a more scarce and precious resource than money. If ...
39
In short, the behaviour of your students is not acceptable - no matter how good or bad your teaching was.
If something like this were to happen at my university, I as vice dean for teaching would invite the whole group for a face-to-face meeting and explain to them how adults should solve problems.
In fact, this is something you should aim for, since the ...
39
Just responding to the isolation part...
I am a non-EU postdoc working in UK. Postdocs have short contracts and visas are tied to contracts. I have recently got to 5 years and therefore residency after 4 short term visas. Total visa costs (just for me) over 5500 GBP and no funding provided. Add in my partner's visas to get the full cost.
Also, without ...
38
This is called an administrative encumbrance, it is indeed very standard.
The general notion is that if you owe the university money, then the administration will deny you things.
These things may include: unit results, the ability to graduate, exam timetables, or the ability to enrol in new units.
In what was certainly a bug, students at my wife's ...
37
No, this information will not be made available to the hiring committee and not filling out this information will not have any negative consequences.
The university uses the data to monitor discrimination - from time to time, it is checked whether the percentage of successful applicants from minorities is roughly the same as the percentage of the respective ...
37
In addition to the other answer, I think a big problem you are facing is that you and the UK government do not having matching expectations of what a PhD student position is. You say:
Having chosen the UK to study with the belief that 'as long as I am competent I should be qualified for the job', the reality has really slapped back at me.
In terms of UK ...
37
Your original title seemed to imply you are talking about an ordered court appearance, which could be scheduled in conflict with an exam, in which case you should reschedule one or the other. If the court would refuse to reschedule, you would have fairly good reason to request the exam be delayed (I cannot answer the legal question of whether a school would ...
35
This is just a peculiarity of British English that read can have this particular meaning. The New Oxford American Dictionary says:
read
3. chiefly Brit. study (an academic subject) at a university: I'm reading English at Cambridge
[ no obj. ]: he went to Manchester to read for a BA in Economics.
So, it's more about language itself than the official ...
35
There is no reason why a post doc cannot be appointed at a higher point on the spine if there is money there, that said, rarely is there money available. The number of people doing multiple post docs in the UK is smaller than in the US, and they usually stay at the same school. That means they often can be appointed to a higher grade. Therefore grants for ...
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