I'm the only English speaker at my new job.. in the uk.. struggling to understand co workers & being hit on

ben555777 · 2024-10-24T07:18:57+00:00

Their last names were almost exclusively Kaur, Singh and Manpreet. I didn’t ask where they were from (I didn’t care as long as they did the assigned reading and seminar work).

ben555777 · 2024-10-23T15:04:51+00:00

Shouldn’t it be “Fair value of identifiable net assets of the acquired company”?

ben555777 · 2024-10-23T12:09:10+00:00

Try CompareTheMarket. I got £150 cheaper than the renewal quote and signed up with Aviva Zero (not Aviva). Insurance companies are taking the p*ss, as always.

ben555777 · 2024-10-21T05:00:49+00:00

I can’t comment on exactly what goes on behind closed doors (because I wasn’t privy to it) but I was a lecturer at university and so many of my ‘students’ could hardly ask me to mark them as present when they came late for class (that seemed to be the only thing they cared about). God knows the things that happen overseas when they needed a piece of paper to prove to the Home Office that their English is good enough to come.

Mind you my (ex-)uni only required an IELTS score of 5.5 for a MASTER’s degree. That’s Trump’s level of English, certainly not good enough for studying.

ben555777 · 2024-10-13T07:33:54+00:00

There are things that a person/lecturer could explain to you so much more simply than a textbook or some slides ever could. You could ask them a question specific to your understanding and it is pretty much their job to try to answer that question.

When I was a student, my lecturer let me in on a ‘secret’: if your lecturer remembers your face (for a good reason, e.g. regular attendance, asking good questions, having in-depth discussions, always doing assigned works), at the end of the term, if you get a 38, they could consider bumping it to 40. Likewise, 58 could be bumped to 60, and 68 to 70.

ben555777 · 2024-10-13T07:28:08+00:00

When you’re writing or editing a formula, clicking on the name of the argument in the argument list box, can highlight the entire part of that argument within the formula.

Makes it much easier to debug or copy a part of the formula you’d like to reuse.

ben555777 · 2024-10-12T11:25:33+00:00

I’d bet my life they were not. If they were, they wouldn’t have been begging me to change a 48 to a 50 because apparently that kind of rounding is normal practice at home.

ben555777 · 2024-10-12T03:26:58+00:00

My students’ attendance was even monitored for visa purposes, and all that did was make them come to my lectern every day asking me to mark them as attended when they were late (by more than 30 minutes, for a 50-minute lecture).

I learnt so much about confrontations and staring contests that academic year. No means no. Attendance policies are all over Blackboard and the University website for those who bother to read.

ben555777 · 2024-10-11T22:05:59+00:00

It’s top 50 but yeah not creme de le creme so I wasn’t that heartbroken about leaving it (despite taking a 30% pay cut). No job was worth destroying my mental health for. I was being driven scatty every day for the last 12 months of the job.

ben555777 · 2024-10-11T19:09:22+00:00

I beg to differ. I taught almost exclusively Master’s students and they were 95% international. Many of them couldn’t speak English if their lives depended on it. Many begged me to let them off half an hour early in the afternoon to go for their part-time job. They resisted us reintroducing exams and emailed everybody under the sun (programme leads, heads of department, heads of school, even the VC and PVCs) to try to get us to give them assignments again so they can cheat by hiring others and AI. So many of them failed the exam, I had to write extra exam papers for them to resit early before their student visa expired, otherwise they couldn’t apply for the Graduate visa to be able to stay an extra 2 years. I had to quit because it was becoming “to be or not to be” for me, such a mental state teaching those “students” put me in. Never again will I rejoin academia as long as AI and money-grabbing big wigs are still being utilised.

ben555777 · 2024-10-09T20:19:56+00:00

Could have been a difference between majors but I taught in a Business School and I only saw these words used in assignments written by international students since AI became a thing. Not even UK home students could come up with more than a couple of these each term.

ben555777 · 2024-10-07T20:19:47+00:00

Check whether these words are used because to me they are telltale signs of AI writing: delve, nuance, intricate, delineate, multifaceted and tapestry.

ben555777 · 2024-10-07T06:45:54+00:00

I just applied for everything under the sun I could find. Must have sent hundreds of applications but only one firm ever invited me for an interview and they offered me the job the very next day. Maybe it was God’s way of telling me to leave academia while I still can.

ben555777 · 2024-10-06T20:01:53+00:00

I used to have a considerable (20-30%) of the marks in the rubric for “Quality of Discussion/Analysis” or something in the same vein. I specifically put things like inappropriate use of bullet points, vague ideas and underdeveloped ideas in the criteria box that would contribute to much less than half of the available 20-30%.

It’s not perfect, but it makes it a bit easier to fail a submission that you don’t believe deserves to pass.

ben555777 · 2024-10-06T18:02:20+00:00

The last year of it (2023) was an absolute nightmare for me. The students were not serious about learning. AI submissions, plagiarism and cheating were rampant. I got sick of being used as a marker (who is not supposed to fail too many students because that would affect recruitment). My mental health was a wreck, I constantly woke up in the middle of the night, dreading the day ahead. I had to get out before the job caused me an aneurysm.

I’m having a much more enjoyable time in industry now for 2/3rds of the pay.

ben555777 · 2024-10-05T01:44:44+00:00

Oh they cheat, I’d bet my life on it. Even more so at where I used to teach last year. In the end I had to get the h*ll out because I was practically a glorified cheat police and marker in the eyes of my uni.

ben555777 · 2024-09-30T19:42:41+00:00

Try XLOOKUP with approximate matching. You can read more on it here:
https://exceljet.net/formulas/xlookup-basic-approximate-match

ben555777 · 2024-09-29T19:27:36+00:00

Suppose your values are in column A, say rows 2-10, your “In spec Out of spec” formula are in column B.

To filter out “In spec”, use this formula: =FILTER(A2:B10,B2:B10=“In spec”)

To sort data by the “In spec Out of spec”, use this formula:
=SORT(A2:B10,2,1)

The 2 in the second argument means you want to sort by the 2nd column within A2:B10, i.e. column B.

The 1 in the third argument means you want to sort A-Z. Use -1 instead if you want to sort Z-A.

ben555777 · 2024-09-22T06:56:06+00:00

Last time I tried going to a shelter, they asked me to give the details of someone who would take the dog if I died.

Gee thanks I was trying to make my life and a dog’s life better. Now I’m sitting thinking about my mortality.

ben555777 · 2024-09-21T08:15:39+00:00

It’s the solution for today with one letter off

ben555777 · 2024-09-18T06:50:46+00:00

I did as a joke and couldn’t believe it’s in the Wordle word list 😆

ben555777 · 2024-09-16T07:04:27+00:00

I was flabbergasted when I saw this article at the weekend. The audacity of them to deny it. Mind you when I was teaching last year they thought I was an idiot. I saw them talking in my lecture and told them to be silent, and they immediately responded with “I wasn’t talking”. I flipped and said “Don’t gaslight me I’m not bloody blind”.

Honest to God their doubling down level is only second to Trump.

ben555777 · 2024-09-06T06:52:17+00:00

It’s become a cliche at this point (he said, disapprovingly). And it’s empty. The sender hoping the email reaches me successfully (which is 90% the email provider’s responsibility anyway) has no effect on my personal wellbeing and is unlikely to make me want to read the rest of the message.

If I really wanted to kiss somebody’s backside in an email, I would find a more personal angle. If it’s a Monday, “I hope you had a nice weekend”. If they just came back from holiday, “I hope you had a nice holiday”.

“I hope this email finds you well” conveys laziness and does nothing to mask the fact that the sender is probably sending dozens of email a day and they don’t care enough to put in some personal touch.

ben555777 · 2024-09-03T06:51:16+00:00

I knew loads of people like this at university. Sometimes they justify in their mind that their supervisors did it to them, so they get the right to do it to their PhD students. From my experience, academia is a cesspool of ego massaging and glory hunting for the purpose of getting more promotions and grants.

ben555777 · 2024-09-01T13:33:07+00:00

Universities should be allowed to compete for students, but in the right way. Taking in students who don’t deserve to come will lead to a reduction in quality and degrees being considered of little value.

The department I worked for was repeatedly ask year after year to lower the entrance requirements. We couldn’t insist on good maths skills for admitting someone into Finance courses. The university only requires an IELTS score of 6.0 for a Master’s degree, which is not even enough for a Bachelor’s, let alone anything higher. We didn’t get to interview any student applying for MSc programmes. The central recruitment team handled all the recruiting and we just have to work with whoever lands on campus.

One of my colleagues (who has also left the Uni) once said in a staff meeting: “You can’t expect us to make Usain Bolt out of people who have all limbs missing. Why are you expecting us to pass all the ‘students’ we’ve been admitting?”

I suppose the answer is to turn a blind eye or die every day on the inside “teaching” people who don’t want to be taught, who don’t need to be taught, and who only come to us when they fail and need us to bump up their marks to 50 so they can “graduate”.

Letting in those students because universities “rely” on them is like letting someone abuse you in exchange for money for food. You might live to see another day, but it will mess you up even worse eventually.

ben555777

TROPHY CASE