Phd Student Confirmation: Fill & Download for Free

I dismissed a PhD student once. He wasn’t showing up for work most days, wasn’t doing any of the work he’d agreed to even when he was there, and had a disturbing pattern of lying and misrepresenting himself and his position. He said there were no underlying physical or mental health issues and he was happy with the project that he’d been assigned, but showed no progress on even the simplest step towards getting that project done that I could devise. He wasn’t even showing me failed attempts — as far as I could tell, despite promises, he wasn’t even trying. He had a consulting business on the side and I eventually realised that he saw the PhD as just a convenient way to get a stipend and an institutional affiliation while he worked on something else. He was my first PhD student so it took longer than it should have for me to stop finding excuses for him, but he was out about eight months after his PhD officially began.I’ve not seen other PhD students actively dismissed, but a few of my friends had to leave PhD programs without finishing because they ran out of time and funding and I know of one local student who failed her confirmation of candidature (the defense of her PhD proposal needed to continue after the first year).

Insecurity.Most PhD students I know are secretly petrified about what tomorrow will bring. Most of us started this academic journey because of our passion and because we believe we are part of a select few of really smart people. We have been topping most of the classes we’ve been in since high school and already have a reputation for being intelligent. Some of us were voted “most likely to succeed”.Fast forward 5 years after our undergraduate, we are about to complete our PhD. Our account balances aren’t that sexy. Every time we go to social media, we see some of our former classmates that weren’t “most likely to succeed” actually winning in life. We are stuck in the lab, classroom or conference. We are constantly bombarded with the heads-up about how most Phd do not get tenured positions. How we are over-qualified for most industry jobs available.Our family members are beginning to lose patient with our ability to transform those potentials into greatness. Some are beginning to subtly suggest that we consider career change. We can’t come out openly to discuss our fears with them because then we would have confirmed the hopelessness we feel and they suspect.Most Phd students can’t admit it even to ourselves that we are scared shitless about the likelihood of this career choice to turn into something worthy of the time, money and emotional investment we have put into it.

Did you divide by the number of faculty? The number of students is not meaningful as an independent measure; what matters is the number of students per faculty (keeping in mind the average can be a skewed measure in small departments).In computer science, it’s common to have an average of 3–4 students per faculty member. My department prefers to have smaller numbers (e.g., we don’t have huge groups with 10–15 students working with one faculty member) so we have about 75 PhD students for about 30 faculty.Also, did you confirm that that’s all the number of students the department has, as opposed to that being all the number of Web pages you found?Finally, if a department has a small number of PhD students, maybe they’re just being…responsible?