They’re Trying To Kill Me
April 20th, 2006 by PotatoWow, I’ve been talking about movies a lot lately. Let’s get back to the real world for just a quick post here (I know, the real world sucks, which is why we watch movies)…
So I get a call this morning that I need to quickly, like right-this-minute, edit my acknowledgments and re-send them to the department, because one of my examiners is listed there as a co-author for my review paper so he can’t be an examiner so if that’s the case I’m basically fucked for defending this term. I’m a little groggy and not believing this, but I do it, and check my email and find a whole string of messages about this.
You see, there was a hell of a time getting an examining board together for me, so in the end we had to use one of the people on my supervisory committee. This isn’t terribly unusual, since you try to nab the people who know your subject area for your committee when you start, and those end up being the same people qualified to examine you. The only stipulation is that they sit on the sidelines while you prepare the thesis (and he did).
… so when someone caught that he was listed as a co-author, they weren’t sure about how kosher the whole thing was and all of a sudden everyone was scrambling about looking for a last minute replacement examiner and recklessly throwing around terrible words like “delay” or “postpone”. Nuh-uh, none of that.
Then, after a lot of stressing and hair-pulling, and my committee member/examiner testifying that he really hasn’t seen the review paper in about a year (and truthfully is really only a coauthor because he’s part of the same group — he hasn’t written a damn thing, and I doubt he even read the whole thing through yet, let alone reading all the studies that went into it), the university said that it was ok, and we’ll go ahead as planned, so everything’s ok now.
Some days I swear they’re just trying to give me a stroke to save the trouble of an exam.
April 21st, 2006 at 10:15 am
heh, at least they’re keeping you on your toes, not trying to bore you to death…