The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
4:03pm on Thursday, 30th March, 2023:
Anecdote
It was the late degree congregation yesterday at the University of Essex. This is mainly for the benefit of MSc students (who finish later in the year than BSc students), along with a handful of BSc students who studied abroad and some PhD students who finished at the right time.
I was part of procession, but thankfully didn't have to read anything this time. I was there to cheer on one of my PhD supervisees, Joseph Walton-Rivers, but there were also two MSc students and a BSc whom I'd supervised, so that was a pleasant surprise.
Joseph had a wretched time with his PhD. He was a member of staff at the time, on a teaching contract, so needed two external examiners. Finding two in the right area was a big problem, because he was part of the IGGI Doctoral Training Centre — as were most of his prospective examiners. When it came to his viva voce, his abstract gave the impression that his thesis was about believability whereas actually it was about AI (beating Monte Carlo tree search in situations with hidden information). He was invited to resubmit, then COVID-19 hit. Along with everyone else on a fixed-term teaching contract at Essex, he was sacked. Fortunately, there was a job opening at Falmouth (which has an excellent games department) that he managed to land, but he had to prepare new modules and to teach them. Under severe time pressure, he made some changes to his thesis and resubmitted, but the resubmission was not accepted by the externals on the grounds that if they did accept it they couldn't pass it. They instead listed explicitly all the changes they wanted to see. Joseph addressed all the ones he thought made sense and prepared himself to defend the ones he thought didn't. The second viva voce was as tough as, if not tougher than, the first one. Nevertheless, he held his ground and impressed the examiners. This time, they passed it.
You can see why, after such a battle, I wanted to be at the degree ceremony even though I should have been marking (and had taken the day off to sort out some of my mum's affairs). No-one can say he didn't get his PhD on merit!
The degree ceremony was for the departments of Computer Science, Psychology and Biological Sciences. In the Psychology part of the awards, as one young woman walked to be awarded her degree her mortarboard fell off. She had big hair and didn't notice. Academics on the front row of the stage (I was behind them), picked it up and struggled to pass it to her as she walked on. The Pro-Chancellor, who was awarding the degrees, tried to call her back but in so doing his big flouncy gown sleeve knocked over a carafe of water and flooded the floor. One of the other academics on the stage had to race off to get a roll of paper to mop it up. It was a huge blue roll of the stuff, and most of it was used absorbing the spill. As one academic rolled it out (at quite an impressive speed, I have to say), another two soaked up the water.
It was something of a metaphor for the degree ceremony as a whole: dispensing pieces of paper for practical purpose.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2023 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).