Saturday, November 19, 2005

I'm not feeling the love

I'll try not to go into too much of a rant about this but it will be hard. I'm a bit pissed off at the department I'm in. Now no department is perfect, they all have their flaws however I'm really not feeling the love from the department. I know I shouldn't be vain and think that the department should care about me at all, after all I'm just a grad student. However, I've found their interest in you pretty much dies off when you hit the 5 year mark. I think by this point most of the department administrators see you as some sort of annoying presence that just won't go away. They also start looking at the numbers. They are all about looking good on paper and if the average time to finish a PhD in their department is over 5 years then that is frowned upon by the university. Although oddly my committe and my prof don't seem too concerned about wanting me to finish soon so apparently they didn't get the memo about pushing grad students out the door.

1 comment:

doctor T said...

Across Canada the average for an English PhD goes from 5 years up to 8, so people at the 5 year mark are still considered the norm. Once you hit the 8 year mark they start trying to push you out, but with funding as shitty as it is these days they shouldn't really be bitching when we lose time because of TA, teaching and RA duties.

Don't lose hope!