by nurazaliah | Jul 31, 2019 | SUPERVISION
- Understands the qualities associated with doctoral level research in their discipline, and communicates these to the PhD student
- Gives time and thought to the selection and acceptance of students for PhD research
- Establishes a good working relationship with the student
- Clarifies expectations throughout the PhD
- Inspires and motivates the PhD student
- Supports the conceptual development of the
- Guides the timing and sequencing of project activities
- Monitors research activities to ensure timely completion
- Supports the student through institutional processes for monitoring progress and reporting
- Provides constructive and timely feedback
- Identifies and deals with potential conflicts and difficult situations (academic and personal)
- Ensures that the research is of publishable
- Anticipates problems and assists the PhD student’s adaptation of their research to cope with problems and challenges
- Advises, and enforces where necessary, the academic and research standards
of the PhD research
- Encourages and advises the PhD student on appropriate professional development
- Encourages the PhD student to have an appropriate work-life
- Assists the PhD student with their preparation of the thesis and for the viva
- Actively guides the PhD student’s preparation for their post-PhD
- Is aware of and responds to the changing relationship with the PhD student over time, and especially the balance between structure and independence
- Gives sufficient time to these
- Invests time in their own professional development as a PhD supervisor
by nurazaliah | Jul 4, 2019 | HowTo
Queen couldn’t possibly have been Queen without Freddie Mercury, nor could it have been Queen without Brian May. Thanks not least to the recent biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, the band’s already larger-than-life lead singer has become even larger still. But its guitarist, despite the film’s surface treatment of his character, is in his own way an equally implausible figure. Not only did he show musical promise early, forming his first group while still at school, he also got his A Levels in physics, mathematics, and applied mathematics, going on to earn a Bachelor of Science in Physics with honors at Imperial College London.
Naturally, May then went for his PhD, continuing at Imperial College where he studied the velocity of, and light reflected by, interplanetary dust in the Solar System. He began the program in 1970, but “in 1974, when Queen was but a princess in its infancy, May chose to abandon his doctorate studies to focus on the band in their quest to conquer the world.” So wrote The Telegraph‘s Felix Lowe in 2007, the year the by-then 60-year-old (and long world-famous) rocker finally handed in his thesis. “The 48,000-word tome, Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, which sounds suspiciously like a Spinal Tap LP, was stored in the loft of his home in Surrey.” You can read it online here.
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by nurazaliah | Jul 3, 2019 | HowTo
Last week John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and subject of the blockbuster film A Beautiful Mind, passed away at the age of 86. He died in a taxi cab accident in New Jersey.
Days later, Cliff Pickover highlighted a curious factoid: When Nash wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1950, “Non Cooperative Games” at Princeton University, the dissertation (you can read it online here) was brief. It ran only 26 pages. And more particularly, it was light on citations. Nash’s diss cited two texts: One was written by John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern, whose book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), essentially created game theory and revolutionized the field of economics; the other cited text, “Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games,” was an article written by Nash himself. And it laid the foundation for his dissertation, another seminal work in the development of game theory, for which Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994.
The reward of inventing a new field, I guess, is having a slim bibliography.
from http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/read-john-nashs-super-short-phd-thesis.html
by nurazaliah | Jul 1, 2019 | HowTo
Imagine being Stephen Hawking’s dissertation advisor? Not that most of us can put ourselves in the shoes of eminent Cambridge physicist Dennis Sciama… but imagine a student succeeding so profoundly, after having overcome such remarkable difficulty, to become the celebrated Stephen Hawking? One would feel immensely proud, I’d guess, and maybe just a little intimidated. Some graduate-level professors might even feel threatened by such a student. It’s doubtful, however, that Sciama—who signed off on Hawking’s thesis in 1966 and died in 1999—felt this way.
As F.R. Ellis and Roger Penrose write, when Hawking announced a significant finding about black holes in 1974, Sciama “quickly recognized the importance… hailing it as initiating a new revolution in our understanding.” Despite his portrayal by David Thewlis as “a kind of authoritarian gatekeeper” in the Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything, Sciama “was much more than that picture suggests,” writes another of his highly accomplished mentees, Adrian Melott; “he was a superb mentor who brought out the best in his students.” Ellis and Penrose, themselves esteemed scientists strongly influenced by Sciama, write of his “astonishing succession of research students,” three of whom became fellows of the Royal Society.
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