Friday, January 16, 2009

PhD 5.0

As the name suggests... This will detail the confirmed signs and symptoms of a PhD candidate who has completed or about to complete 5years of back breaking, brain racking, self questioning work and is not sure to what end did all this happen...
The things to look for in a PhD 5.0 are :
1. He/She will never plan his/her life farther than 2 hrs into the future. Most of the concepts of time spans are now aligned either to experiment incubation times or paper/manuscript review times. The reason is the incessant dersire NOT to think too much into the future.
2. The only person hated more that Osama Bin Laden is anyone who asks them any of the following questions "when will your thesis be done ?", "Got any offers after PhD ?"
3. It is a personal insult if anyone talks about their field or about new papers in their field. ( 99% of the times because they have never heard of those papers in spite of reading about 99000 related articles on pubmed)
4. If their character/avatar in an online role playing game gets a cool sword that glows, they think it is a significant achievement in life.
5. They tell others how really they want to be done with it and move on but in reality pray that they never have to because the idea that their work is going to be judged out in the real world and their entire lives depend on it scares the pants off them.
So these five symptoms are the most sure way of identifying possible post doc candidates. Maybe we should find a way to quantify these 5 characters and select people based on these as well as research ability.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

im not sure one can find homogeneous enough population of phds to conduct proper quatntification expts....
i speak w/o experience but still i think its a valid point.

shilpa said...

hmmm to say nothing of how the villain in all video games is a Sim/bot who looks like your guide!

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just your regular guy who dreams too much. i read a lot don't remember it all though.. swim, trek, yoga.. think and read more.. that about sums it up..