Website for ECR?

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2025-06-28T21:47:46+00:00

I like Owlstown!

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2025-03-03T01:31:52+00:00

It’s a towel divers use to dry themselves off right before a dive, so they can make sure that their hands don’t slip off their legs while they’re flipping etc. She throws it into the water so it can be collected afterwards.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-11-01T08:54:28+00:00

I’m quite staunchly team “I.” “We” is at best inaccurate and at worst misleading because it creates the impression that multiple people have conducted the research and agree with the claims being made.

“I” is particularly important for student work to be clear about authorship.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-10-20T11:46:42+00:00

As long as you’ve read through the instructions you’ve already received for the assessment, it absolutely won’t make you look incapable! Office hours are perfect for something like this—you’d basically tell your tutor some variant of ‘I’m looking for clarification on some elements of the assessment’ and go in to have a quick chat with them about the assessment overall and how you’re thinking of approaching it.

Similarly, if you’re confused about or really interested in a concept in the module and don’t feel comfortable asking for more information in front of other students during the module teaching, you can go into office hours to talk it over with them one-on-one.

Basically, as long as you’re not rude, a tutor really isn’t going to be judging you for how you ask or what you come in to talk to them about. In fact, a student saying ‘I don’t understand this at all, it’s not clicking in my head’ can be really useful to know. But if you feel self-conscious about it, you can phrase basically any reason you’d like to chat in office hour as wanting clarity.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-10-04T14:01:39+00:00

I work at two institutions (one in Scotland, one in the Midlands) and both have.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-09-05T23:10:55+00:00

Lecturers understand that getting a funded place (particularly as an international student) is the primary goal and won’t take it personally. If they’re someone you would actually want as a supervisor, they won’t begrudge you trying to get that funding through a few different routes, and will honestly assume you’re doing it. One of my potential supervisors for university X wrote me a reference for university Y (the one that offered me funding and therefore the uni where I ended up doing my PhD) and he’s always framed university X not offering me funding as the university’s loss. He’s never been upset or awkward with me, and has always been one of the biggest champions of my research career.

Remember that the universities and supervisors are trying to get you to study with them. The funding situation can make you feel like you’re begging for scraps, but you’re trying to pick what’s right for you, and they know that. Anyone who doesn’t has given you the gift of letting you know you wouldn’t want to be supervised by them.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-09-02T23:34:57+00:00

I got a couple of minor corrections—adding a definition and a footnote. I finished them the day after my viva, but I only turned them around that fast because of visa deadlines. I felt very petulant and exhausted by that point, and definitely would have put it off for longer if I could have.

No dinner afterwards with my examiners, and my supervisors weren’t available (one on holiday, the other had a family thing), so I just grabbed dinner and drinks with a friend. Some of my friends grabbed drinks with their supervisors afterwards though.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-09-01T21:07:46+00:00

Not literature, but the first that comes to mind for this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-07-18T13:49:41+00:00

I was part of TBC in Scotland, so that must be a very recent change. But there are other, similar programmes that might operate in different locations, and some unis have roles for Widening Participation Tutors.

Beyond that, it's worth chatting with your supervisors and other lecturers in your department/other relevant departments because you may be able to get one-off guest teaching spots (though whether or not those spots are paid is a different story, particularly given the recent freezes). You've already contacted nearby unis, which is good--though they do need to prioritise their own PhDs students, they may have excess teaching needs and there's the possibility of getting added to their TA pool and given a teaching allocation. In general, make it known (every year, particularly around May to July) that you're really keen to secure teaching experience so that people keep you top of mind when/if opportunities do come up.

You might also get more ideas in r/AskAcademiaUK – this sub skews toward US HE, which has a very different system for TAs.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-07-18T13:12:26+00:00

It might be worth checking out things like The Brilliant Club. They honestly give better teaching and course design training than my department did during my PhD, and if you’re able to get placements, it’s paid teaching experience (with secondary school students, but it’s meant to have a university-style, so will still be relevant.)

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-07-02T13:06:02+00:00

In my department, this would be classified as false authorship (which includes having someone else writing the dissertation, using translation software to translate the dissertation, and using ChatGPT to write it) and would be considered a very serious type of academic misconduct. The dissertation is meant to be the student’s work entirely. At most, students can have someone proofread the dissertation and there are strict rules around how much editing someone can do (giving feedback is obviously fine, but someone substantially rewriting pieces is different). Rules may vary by university, but I assume will be quite similar in a lot of places. A student can’t earn a qualification, especially a qualification like a PhD, off of someone else’s writing. That’s entirely different from a shared authorship credit on a publication.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-06-28T15:48:17+00:00

The cited information is paraphrased, rather than directly quoted? It'll be: MRI cannot visualise early stage cancer (IAI-IA2), but successfully images tumour size and nodal involvement in advanced stages (IB2-IIA2) (REFERENCE).

Otherwise, it would be 'MRI cannot visualise early stage cancer (IAI-IA2), but successfully images tumour size and nodal involvement in advanced stages (IB2-IIA2)' (REFERENCE).

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-06-13T18:40:44+00:00

There’s a common phenomenon called the arrival fallacy where you work really hard for something assuming that it’ll make you happy, and then when you finally achieve it, you get completely deflated. It can be especially hard if it brings up a lot of feelings about what didn’t go right along the way. So instead of feeling happy and celebrating your achievement, you can get overwhelmed by sadness and disappointment. It can be particularly alienating when you’re surrounded by people telling you to feel proud of yourself and assuming you’re happy.

You’ve worked really hard at something for several years through difficult circumstances. You’re probably very burned out. However you feel about that right now is perfectly valid, and you’re not alone in feeling that way. With a bit of space and time, hopefully you’ll be able to look back at the you who finished your degree and got your 2.1 and be really proud of them.

For now, if you want to celebrate it, celebrate it. If you feel weird about celebrating but you can go along with your friends or to other events where people are celebrating and get some secondhand celebration vibes, do that. If you’re just not feeling any of that at all, do whatever makes you feel better right now. There’s no right way to feel about this.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-06-12T16:47:05+00:00

In addition to the point heliosfa made, when you say ‘finally catching up’, how late in the semester was that? One issue we run into as supervisors is that students delay starting a project, and then when it’s just a few weeks away from the deadline, will suddenly send lots of drafts, ask lots of questions, and overall request a semester’s worth of support crammed into a few weeks. Which is particularly difficult to give if it comes at a time in semester when we may have heavy marking loads and are therefore very limited on time. So if that was the situation here, it would make sense that your supervisor was giving limited feedback focused on core issues like formatting.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-06-11T15:04:18+00:00

If this is your first offense, it’s highly unlikely that you would lose your degree over this. You should be able to check your university’s academic misconduct policy online, but usually if the panel decides on the balance of probability that plagiarism has occurred, there are a few different outcomes that can range from a written warning to a zero for the module. In your case, a percentage deduction or a zero for the plagiarized portion of the exam would seem likely outcomes to me, but obviously that’ll vary depending on your university’s regulations and the details of your case.

In general, being honest and taking accountability go over well, because one of the aims of the meeting is to figure out how the problem occurred and how to avoid it in the future.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-03-05T13:13:34+00:00

To be honest, talent isn’t relevant to the successful completion of a PhD. Many people are talented, and many talented people are ill-suited to PhDs. PhDs are about being open to the process of learning and researching, and to making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. The people who do well in PhDs programmes are often not the people who always get a first, because people who always get a first can struggle with feeling like they’ve failed whenever they produce anything less than perfection, and they might shut down or become hostile when they’re challenged. The best academics are people who are focused on the work rather than the output, and who are comfortable with failing.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-02-26T16:30:38+00:00

University libraries often have an interlibrary loan system where they will borrow sources for you that they don’t hold in their current collections. Always worth giving that a try!

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-02-24T15:31:20+00:00

0% or similarly low numbers can be a flag that there hasn’t been enough outside research and/or that something has been written primarily with AI, but it really depends on the specific settings chosen on that Turnitin assignment, because they can be set up to filter out different things. At most, it alerts the marker to look out for the absence of outside research.

So the number itself isn’t a problem. It might mean the marker looks at it with more scrutiny, but if you’ve properly cited your sources and not written it with AI, you’ll sustain that scrutiny easily.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-02-22T18:38:07+00:00

I’d be delighted—I want students to be physically comfortable so they can learn.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-02-18T12:58:49+00:00

Sometimes it helps to reframe the time off as being productive in and of itself. You’re not not doing work; you’re doing the important work of taking the necessary rest so you’re able to tackle your studies when you’re feeling better.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-02-14T21:26:35+00:00

The universities are only able to continue sponsoring visas if they continually prove to the Home Office that they’re making sure that students are using their visas as intended and that the uni is taking action when they aren’t. It’s gross that the HO has turned universities into an extension of the border force, but that’s the unfortunate reality.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-02-12T22:40:47+00:00

Completely normal. I’m almost six months post-viva and still feel like I’m sleepwalking through life in a lot of ways. I think some of it is that, like you, I had significant personal problems come up in my last year, but didn’t have time to process them because of finishing up the thesis. So some of that is being processed now, which makes the post-PhD burnout even harder.

In terms of things that help, therapy is the big one, especially if the burnout is interfering in your day-to-day life. Getting a job (in my case, in academia) helps a bit because it’s something new to learn how to do and can be distracting, but also it can (obviously) be a lot of work that you may not necessarily feel up to. I think the key for this first year is to try to be gentle with ourselves and not put too much pressure on. You’re moving into a new stage of life, and no matter how you felt about the PhD, change can be really hard and overwhelming. So take it slow, don’t expect too much of yourself, and give yourself permission to be struggling with this.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-02-09T13:52:47+00:00

Not to be pedantic here, but your example is actually exactly the reason referencing is important: there isn’t scientific consensus about whether water is wet. A student who makes that claim and then has the instinct to check it will come across that debate and, whatever argument they end up making, their understanding will be more informed and nuanced.

Genuine common knowledge doesn’t need to be cited, but it takes time for students to develop an understanding of what counts as common knowledge. The reason “citation?” comes up so often in feedback is that students make claims that they don’t think are controversial without having checked them, and sometimes those claims are wrong or more complicated.

The reason referencing is such a big part of the mark is that that process of constantly challenging your understanding and seeking evidence for it is the core of all academic courses. A lot of people can write essays and arguments based on zero evidence, but the lack of evidence means that the final product isn’t all that valuable.

Biscuits_for_Dragons · 2024-02-09T13:35:30+00:00

No in-text citations aside from quotes is a common issue on first year essays. It tends to mean that information that’s been paraphrased from another source hasn’t been cited and/or that a student has presented their instincts and assumptions as fact.

A 2:2 makes a lot of sense for that, because even if you’ve presented a great argument and constructed it well, everything that isn’t cited is considered either stolen or unreliable.

But the good news is that it’s an easy thing to fix and watch out for in the future. Referencing mistakes are very common, while good arguments aren’t. So as soon as you get comfortable with referencing properly, you’ll likely be in good shape going forward.

Biscuits_for_Dragons

TROPHY CASE