Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224
i'll wait for spark to show up to correct you. again, this goes back possibly years, you having this view of science PhD's as 'hands on' and 'useful', whereas all humanities PhD's are 'esoteric flights of fancy for young aristocrats'. most science PhD's are incredibly theoretical and are taken solely because the person finds the topic/academic research interesting and personally motivating.
Spearhead
Gulf coast redneck hippy
+731|6659|Tampa Bay Florida
I remember sometime in the last year Jay made a comment about how poor people are poor not because they haven't had the opportunity but because of the cultural influences and social attitudes making them not want to go to college or something of that sort.  Pretty ironic now.  Not trying to be a snob but damn some of you guys need to spend some time introverting for a change.  My mom was the first and only person from her family to go to college.  She was a straight A student, went on a state department sponsored trip to the Soviet Union.  She also went to the middle east and spent a year studying in Nigeria.  This was in the late 60's, early 70's.  This was all because of her academic achievement.  All paid for with scholarships, her family literally had zero money.  A time when a lot of schools looked down and outright pressured women not to succeed.  Tell us more about your middle class white male problems preventing you from getting good grades and achieving academically.
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6644|Canberra, AUS

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

i'll wait for spark to show up to correct you. again, this goes back possibly years, you having this view of science PhD's as 'hands on' and 'useful', whereas all humanities PhD's are 'esoteric flights of fancy for young aristocrats'. most science PhD's are incredibly theoretical and are taken solely because the person finds the topic/academic research interesting and personally motivating.
Right now I'm reading up conformal field theory notes so I can do my honours project on it.

That should speak for itself, really.
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
OK, so outside humanities and abstract sciences some people do PhDs because they think it might increase the fund of useful human knowledge somehow.

Im not sure why some people find this so offensive.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224

Spark wrote:

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

i'll wait for spark to show up to correct you. again, this goes back possibly years, you having this view of science PhD's as 'hands on' and 'useful', whereas all humanities PhD's are 'esoteric flights of fancy for young aristocrats'. most science PhD's are incredibly theoretical and are taken solely because the person finds the topic/academic research interesting and personally motivating.
Right now I'm reading up conformal field theory notes so I can do my honours project on it.

That should speak for itself, really.
i'm sure your interest leans that way because of the inherent applicability of conformal field theory to the australian finance job sector!
Spark
liquid fluoride thorium reactor
+874|6644|Canberra, AUS

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

Spark wrote:

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

i'll wait for spark to show up to correct you. again, this goes back possibly years, you having this view of science PhD's as 'hands on' and 'useful', whereas all humanities PhD's are 'esoteric flights of fancy for young aristocrats'. most science PhD's are incredibly theoretical and are taken solely because the person finds the topic/academic research interesting and personally motivating.
Right now I'm reading up conformal field theory notes so I can do my honours project on it.

That should speak for itself, really.
i'm sure your interest leans that way because of the inherent applicability of conformal field theory to the australian finance job sector!
Funny you should say that, there was a course I was looking at last year that was literally called "the mathematics of finance". Was a course I had on the radar... until I saw the lecture slides.

God fucking damn.
The paradox is only a conflict between reality and your feeling what reality ought to be.
~ Richard Feynman
Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224

Dilbert_X wrote:

OK, so outside humanities and abstract sciences some people do PhDs because they think it might increase the fund of useful human knowledge somehow.

Im not sure why some people find this so offensive.
people don't find it offensive. they find it confusing and laughable that you expect a PhD - a formal and professional research qualification within the sector of academia - to 'satisfy' criteria imposed upon it by a job-market/sector that has nothing to do with it. as i've said time and time again, a PhD is an academic qualification and a research project, aimed solely at people who either a) want to do the research in-itself as a pursuit/achievement (though financially unlikely thesedays) or b) for people intending to go into academia. complaining a PhD doesn't answer outside of academia, and complaining that an incredibly specialized and high-level piece of academic work doesn't have 'applicability' outside of academia, makes about as much sense as complaining that an engineering professional license doesn't carry-over well into the world of advertising. it's just nonsense.

say all PhD's should be metred and tempered with 'real world' applicability: do you honestly think the scholarship would be better off? if academic departments said to their intending-researchers and aspiring scholars: "yes, this work is great and all, but it's just a little too esoteric. do you think you could make it appeal more to the graduate workplace?". of course PhD's are esoteric and specialized, it's the highest level of academic qualification possible! (in most western countries anyway; i imagine the german/french 'habilitation' would make you pass-out, foamy mouthed).
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England

Cybargs wrote:

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

wouldn't the military cover colombia? why stop at NYU
he couldn't get into colombia probably.

Jay should chime in on this, but the GI bill pays for 36 months of schooling and coverage is dependent on what you put into it.
No, the coverage is dependent on your home states tuition at state universities. So, if you're a New York State resident and tuition at a SUNY school is $8k/yr, they will pay $8k to any school you attend. They will not cover the full tuition at a place like Columbia.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
Ilocano
buuuurrrrrrppppp.......
+341|6637

Google Inc PhD's.  Software developers and engineers PhD.  Working on interesting real world problems.   Who would have thought.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

i imagine the german/french 'habilitation' would make you pass-out, foamy mouthed).
I just looked into this and found out that people actually fled countries that have this qualification to avoid beating their heads in over it. Seems like a good QC measure to have in place before offering tenure, though.
Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224

Ilocano wrote:

Google Inc PhD's.  Software developers and engineers PhD.  Working on interesting real world problems.   Who would have thought.
omg yes this really discounts 100's of higher education institutions and their paltry PhD's. really stop being such an asian peon, it's boring now. i mean it's not like any other PhD doesn't work on "interesting real world problems". a history PhD doesn't deal with "interesting real world problems" at all, no. you have to MAKE SHIT for a PhD to be 'worthy'. oh, okay. let's just do away with thousands of years of scholarly contemplation and intellectual pursuit. the engineers have arrived now.

i suggest you look into the 700 year history of the PhD as a qualification. engineering master-race.

and yes, the habilitation is a big deal in europe. it's a real quality marker. i don't have a problem with it.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-25 10:01:57)

Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224
oh and i'm pretty sure most google engineers and technical staff will have their PhD's from places like MIT or stanford, in perfectly academic and theoretical fields of research.
Ilocano
buuuurrrrrrppppp.......
+341|6637

I wasn't referring to the engineering part.   About PhD students with intentions to work corporate.   Not just academia research but practical research.

Not just engineering.   Biotech.  Chemistry.   Aerospace.   Astrophysics.   Robotics.  Material science.   Game engine design.   3D modeling.   And on and on.
Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224
right, but they only account for less than half of all science/engineering type PhD's. what about the rest? are they pariahs? the black sheep of the flock? people who have lost their way? doctorates have existed a long time before society became technical.
Spearhead
Gulf coast redneck hippy
+731|6659|Tampa Bay Florida
Its not like archeaoligists have to know history or culture or languages or anything.  They just dig shit up and hand it over to the carbon dating scientists, right?

Last edited by Spearhead (2013-04-25 10:19:12)

Ilocano
buuuurrrrrrppppp.......
+341|6637

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

oh and i'm pretty sure most google engineers and technical staff will have their PhD's from places like MIT or stanford, in perfectly academic and theoretical fields of research.
Yes plus practical research.   The researchers are titled software engineers.   PhD interns mixing it up with the engineers.
Ilocano
buuuurrrrrrppppp.......
+341|6637

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

right, but they only account for less than half of all science/engineering type PhD's. what about the rest? are they pariahs? the black sheep of the flock? people who have lost their way? doctorates have existed a long time before society became technical.
My Google example was to your argument that PhD is overwhelmingly academia.   Not so anymore.
Cheeky_Ninja06
Member
+52|6702|Cambridge, England

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

'pass mark as 40%' shows a woeful lack of understanding about the way universities are marked in the UK. it's not "40% correct", that 40 represents a marker of quality. it's hard to explain how it's calculated, because it's all separate to each institution/department, but basically a 60 is considered a 'good mark' (good enough to get you onto most prestigious graduate job courses). so therefore you could phrase it that "a 60% is a joke", but it really isn't. seldom will a university student - especially in history - ever get above a 72-75. so you judging the university pass-mark as "40%" and concluding that "it's as easy as GCSE's" is really piss-poor tbh. the assumption in humanities courses is that even an 80% is 'unattainable' (75%+ implies publishable quality, like, proper academic work quality, as opposed to a student 'attempt'). it's not exactly a straight '40% (out of 100%) to pass'.

and what would you have if you had gone to do a history degree instead of work in construction? does that really have to be answered? you'd have a history degree, nourishment in a subject you enjoy... and, provided you went to a good enough uni, a history degree opens plenty of doors in the UK. you seem very misguided and not very aware of the subject - perhaps because of your background, as you said. i have many friends who took history degrees who are now all making £25-30k a year doing pretty cushty graduate jobs. the "what is it worth?" or "what use will that degree be to me?" question normally comes from people who don't understand how degrees transfer into work. in the UK you can pretty much get an academic degree in whatever subject you want, so long as it is 'respected' and the university is 'prestigious'. that will get you onto loads of graduate schemes in-itself. after that, your actual degree subject matters less and less, because THEN, and properly THEN, after your university studies, do you start learning 'job skills' and the desired's of your career.

i feel sorry that you missed out on 3-4 years to study something you were interested in. perhaps if you had listened to your advisers you could now be having your cake and eating it.
Why is university marked completely different to A levels? I had several of my exams returned at 100% for A level as I was deemed to be working above the standard required by the paper. Yet in degree course this is never going to be true. As you say 60% is a good mark.....it frustrates me when I have papers returned at 60% because I feel like I have left 40% of the marks on the table. If you get everything right you should get 100%, it doesnt need to be the perfect response as written by jesus, you just need to meet (and maybe exceed) the brief.

Sure I would have liked to do history but to be honest I had enough of being moaned at in class for asking questions about things that wont come up in the exam, i.e. why are you wasting are time asking about that. My education was very much exam preparation rather than imparting knowledge through exploration of a subject.

Im not judging the course by its passmark to make it as easy as GCSE, im referring to the content. When I started my current course it felt like university for people who were to thick to get onto a proper course. In my second year we had a 3 hour lecture on beam calculations. Sounds tough huh. The long and short was you had to times three numbers together. The lecturer even wrote on the board what buttons we needed to press on our calculators so that we could do it. By the end of the 3 hours there were still people that couldn't work it out. I have an A level in physics and now for my degree we are slowly being introduced to the idea of multiplication. This is why I state that the qualification should not be a degree.

I already earn £25-30k a year and I didn't have to spend a years salary on getting a degree. Plus I am still apprentice/assistant so should be going up a whole bunch over the next couple of years as I complete my professional qualifications. I now have 5 years experience doing the job and have a large chunk of responsibility because I have demonstrated my worth.

Yeah in an ideal world I would have taken up the history degree, but in this one I would have been frustrated with the content, pissed off with the weird marking and then finished back at square one to join the hordes of other graduates with a degree that does not translate to the workplace.
Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224
a-levels are marked different to gcse. uni is marked different from a-levels. why it that a big deal? and no, you should just accept that 100% in a history essay is an absurd concept - that means you 'got everything right' on a topic with no exactly defined right answers. it's not exactly a mind-bending concept to get your ahead around if you just aim for a 70% (i.e. a first-class, the highest degree grade you're going to get if you maintain this at an average).

and the course content/difficulty all depends on where you go. university isn't one-size fits all. a 2:1 second-class from a top university will be considerably better/more achieved/harder than a 1:1 first from a lower-ranked university. if you went to a not very good uni with medium/average/poor entry requirements, of course the content is going to be tailored for people of 'average' intelligence. especially if you are taking a course with someone like the open university, who have such a wide and impossibly diverse student-body (almost entirely studying part-time/from home)... well then the course content has to cater to that. repeat: there is no 'one size fits all'. to discredit university or a subject because your own experiences were not great doesn't really make a lot of sense.

and you must be hard of hearing/reading. i already told you that i have plenty of friends who got history degrees from a good uni and now have very respectable graduate jobs. "does not translate to the workplace" is total bullshit. any good degree from any good university in the UK will get you onto those graduate fast-track schemes. the (literal) stipulated entry requirement for even the most prestigious grad courses in london is "a respectable 2:1" (read: a 2:1 'good' honours from a top25 university). as for "i'm already earning 25k a year"... yes, so are my friends, straight out of university. at the start of their careers, too. i'm a little exasperated here. i can't help but feel you're being a little willfully blind. university graduates earn more than non-graduates, on average, it has just been said before. someone with a good history degree is likely going to climb a career ladder further than you, have more opportunities/doors-opened (especially at mid-career management levels, where a degree becomes 'necessary'), and they're going to have actually had the intellectual/social experience of university, too. this may suck for you to acknowledge, but don't try and twist the reality to make out a history degree is 'useless' in the UK. it isn't. if you had followed all those people from your sixth-form to oxbridge for history, the world would literally be your oyster. most of our senior politicians/lawyers have oxbridge history/related degrees.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-25 10:57:15)

globefish23
sophisticated slacker
+334|6293|Graz, Austria

Spearhead wrote:

Its not like archeaoligists have to know history or culture or languages or anything.  They just dig shit up and hand it over to the carbon dating scientists, right?
You're joking, right?

In reality, what it needs to be an archaeologist is to swing by on a whip, avoid the snakes, beat up some Nazis or Thuggees  and swap the gold with bags of sand.
Underpaid Egyptian peasants do the digging.
Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224

Ilocano wrote:

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

right, but they only account for less than half of all science/engineering type PhD's. what about the rest? are they pariahs? the black sheep of the flock? people who have lost their way? doctorates have existed a long time before society became technical.
My Google example was to your argument that PhD is overwhelmingly academia.   Not so anymore.
i think you will find that the great majority (90%+) of PhD's are done within ordinary academic environments, to normal academic requirements and 'ends'. the fact that a certain percentage of post-viva'd science/engineering types go into private industry/commerce doesn't really say much about academia being undermined. again: it would be nice if the people constantly sucking that engineer in the sky's robotic dick actually had a clue about academia. but you evidently don't. the PhD is largely an academic, research-heavy piece of work. 'relevance' is a minor criterion in considering its suitability - and that goes for humanities as well as science, believe it or not, fey empiricists of the world - but the overwhelming impetus for the work is academic, almost to a hermetic fault.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX

Uzique wrote:

people don't find it offensive. they find it confusing and laughable that you expect a PhD - a formal and professional research qualification within the sector of academia - to 'satisfy' criteria imposed upon it by a job-market/sector that has nothing to do with it. as i've said time and time again, a PhD is an academic qualification and a research project, aimed solely at people who either a) want to do the research in-itself as a pursuit/achievement (though financially unlikely thesedays) or b) for people intending to go into academia. complaining a PhD doesn't answer outside of academia, and complaining that an incredibly specialized and high-level piece of academic work doesn't have 'applicability' outside of academia, makes about as much sense as complaining that an engineering professional license doesn't carry-over well into the world of advertising. it's just nonsense.

say all PhD's should be metred and tempered with 'real world' applicability: do you honestly think the scholarship would be better off? if academic departments said to their intending-researchers and aspiring scholars: "yes, this work is great and all, but it's just a little too esoteric. do you think you could make it appeal more to the graduate workplace?". of course PhD's are esoteric and specialized, it's the highest level of academic qualification possible! (in most western countries anyway; i imagine the german/french 'habilitation' would make you pass-out, foamy mouthed).
I've not suggested any of that, simply that your assertion that its purely an academic endeavour is wrong. The purpose of a PhD is to widen human knowledge, to produce original research. Most academic departments do exist to benefit humanity - Medicine, Science, Engineering etc, not just to suck each others dicks with the cleverness of their essays.

That you've chosen a backwater with minimal real-world impact doesn't mean everyone else does by any stretch.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224
hilarious you say "most academic departments" and then name the only 2 that are concerned in any explicit fashion with making 'real world' gains, e.g. medicine and engineering. if you think medicine and engineering are "most" academic departments, you need to take another look at the structure of the university even at imperial, which is a science/technology only institution, most departments and disciplines would have leaned more towards 'pure' theory/science than 'vocational' or 'practical' application. it's also dishonest of you to sneak in "science" there, because TIME and TIME again the fucking SCIENCE ACADEMICS on this forum will come and politely inform you that their work is in no way "practical" or concerned with "invention". you just conveniently ignore this because you like to schematize all sciences as profoundly useful and all humanities as intellectual dross. it isn't that way. most academic departments are concerned solely with intellectual research and 'knowledge for knowledge's sake' - knowledge being philosophically defined in opposition to techne or praxis, you know (you may want to read up on that, too). the vast majority of science-based PhD's will be abstract, theoretical, and esoteric. you continually fail to recognize this, or even listen when someone like spark tells you straight that you're wrong. it is humiliating and frankly a little awkward that you keep repeating this same boring, false dictum... like a shell-shocked bomb-blast victim, emptily repeating the same nonsense verbiage after the full weight of reality lands on his head. do some listening to people actually involved in that which you speak of, old fellow.

and yes, all academic departments exist to "benefit humanity". YOUR problem (local, specific, particular to you) is that you don't think a select few subjects "benefit humanity". this is your opinion, verging on your inane, irrational, neurotic bias - done a graceful favour being called an 'opinion', really. all academic departments have an ideal aim to enrich society/humanity by the continued expansion and reflection of knowledge. your personal filters are just that. keep them to yourself. the rest of the world isn't listening - including the science academics you continually misrepresent, in your twisted, dissonant little mind.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-26 05:42:48)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6075|eXtreme to the maX
The problem for me is I can see the value of academic research which looks forwards, discovers new information, leads on to new things.

'Research' which looks backwards and repeatedly 'investigates' areas which have been done to death 1,000 times already I can't see the value of.

So for example this: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/phys/amopp/studentships   I can see the value of. Its new, original and generating new knowledge of the umiverse, no doubt will need new tools and methods to complete, may or may not lead on to some other area etc.

This: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/eng … index.aspx  I can't see any value in.

Current research projects include one book on medieval paganity (Sarah Salih), another on medieval sodomy (Bob Mills), a third on perception and criticism in Old English literature (Clare Lees) and the edited Cambridge History of Earlier Medieval English Literature (Lees). Lees is also developing a longer-term research project on ways to bring the past creatively into the present: Extreme Pasts and Absolute Presents is funded by a grant from LCACE (London Centre for Arts and Cultural Enterprises).
I'll pass on the easy target of 'medieval sodomy', but 'perception and criticism in Old English literature'? come on guys, hasn't this been done at least a few thousand times already? Does it need to be done yet again? No doubt there'll be a mildly different slant in the resulting book which ~50 people will read but what really is the point?
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Uzique The Lesser
Banned
+382|4224
you just don't get it. exasperating. it's like trying to explain something to a child. 1,000 times.

also stop continually representing medieval studies as the totality of humanities. medieval studies is an incredibly small niche even with the field of literature. let alone the humanities. it's embarrassing that you have to use these dishonest rhetorical techniques. i think medieval studies are useful in the same way ancient history studies are still useful... and there's an argument to be made for that... but i think you are being slimy in the extreme when you contrast UCL's most futuristic fringes with 'medieval' studies, for the sake of a severely misguided argument. it would be the same as portraying the study of moss and lichen in biology as 'the entirety of science research'. it's lame. medieval studies is an easy target for you, because you have this false notion that all academic knowledge should be forward-looking. it's a complete false construction.

also if you think more than 5 people, let alone 50, are reading the average science PhD... again, clueless. there's a joke in the PhD-publishing world -  only 3 people will ever read it: you, your supervisor, and one of your parents. and only one of those three will ever finish it.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-04-26 06:16:50)

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