Dancing in the Rain(forest)
The Belle of New Orleans tried to show me once how to Tango. (Tori Amos)
...somewhere, between the sacred silence and sleep ...disorder. (System of a Down)
Caught a lite sneeze,
Dreamed a little dream,
Made my own pretty hate machine. (Tori Amos)
Monday, October 31, 2005
PhD Exam... a retrospective
Ok, it was 10 days ago, but many of you have asked me about it so...
A PhD exam is a very simple affair: you prepare a thesis (mainly by copy-and-paste from your article(s)), give it to a referee, then prepare a 45-minutes talk. Then you simply give this talk in front of a commission composed by: your advisor, your referee, a bunch of other people who are advisor or referees of other people, some prof related to these last people, and your parents. The difficult part, as you may guess, are your parents. After you have finished your talk (that you have prepared with a really great care, putting inside it many puns and jokes, to keep the audience from sleeping and snoring - which is uneducated, but unavoidable if you limit yourself to the technicalities), your referees and the other people are free to ask you all the questions they want, from the trivial to the sublime.
I was already on friendly terms with my referee, so we joked a bit even when we were not agreeing on some technical point. In the end, it was fun. And my sister keeps teasing me about one of my referee's comment, about a supposed correlation between two variable, that I believe is weak. I'd said: "they correlate, more or less.." when my referee said: "Come on, Tommaso!! Not 'more or less'! Perfectly! They correlate perfectly!". I still hold that the correlation is weak.
The comment my referee give to me when the exam was over was: "Fantastic results. Good talk. You really need to find someone to translate your thesis from Tommaso-english to real english". :-) Some of you think to know english well enough to do a professional work over it? If so, please step on! I will offer you a dinner for a good work!
A PhD exam is a very simple affair: you prepare a thesis (mainly by copy-and-paste from your article(s)), give it to a referee, then prepare a 45-minutes talk. Then you simply give this talk in front of a commission composed by: your advisor, your referee, a bunch of other people who are advisor or referees of other people, some prof related to these last people, and your parents. The difficult part, as you may guess, are your parents. After you have finished your talk (that you have prepared with a really great care, putting inside it many puns and jokes, to keep the audience from sleeping and snoring - which is uneducated, but unavoidable if you limit yourself to the technicalities), your referees and the other people are free to ask you all the questions they want, from the trivial to the sublime.
I was already on friendly terms with my referee, so we joked a bit even when we were not agreeing on some technical point. In the end, it was fun. And my sister keeps teasing me about one of my referee's comment, about a supposed correlation between two variable, that I believe is weak. I'd said: "they correlate, more or less.." when my referee said: "Come on, Tommaso!! Not 'more or less'! Perfectly! They correlate perfectly!". I still hold that the correlation is weak.
The comment my referee give to me when the exam was over was: "Fantastic results. Good talk. You really need to find someone to translate your thesis from Tommaso-english to real english". :-) Some of you think to know english well enough to do a professional work over it? If so, please step on! I will offer you a dinner for a good work!
:: posted by Gaijin, 14:29
1 Comments:
"come on Tomasssssssssssso!!!!!" Pe - rf - ec - tly!!!!"
your wo - nd - erf - ul sister! Lissssssa
your wo - nd - erf - ul sister! Lissssssa
