Dakon
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Everything posted by Dakon
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At my department, all internal funding is revoked as soon as one gets external funding (it's a rule set by the Faculty of Graduate Studies at McGill and not the department). However, I am allowed to have TAship or RAship if I want; they place no restrictions there. And you make a good point, wonderingwillow, about turning down TAships. I was wondering the same thing about my department: in the Fall, I'm going to have to go through the proofs of my book alongside my three courses, and since I do not need the extra money as such, I was considering not taking a TAship in the first semester for fear of just burning out. My graduate coordinator agreed that that was a good idea and suggested that I might even want to wait until my second year, because it wouldn't be a problem for the department and might work out well for me. The department is relatively small, so I wouldn't want to - accidentally put more strain on them. Besides, if one wants to stick in academia, extra teaching experience alongside a SSHRC is always a plus for landing a job.
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I did EM as my second MA. My program is far from a joke: I studied at three different universities (Université catholique de Louvain, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, and Toulouse II-le Mirail), two during the first academic year and one during the last year for thesis preparation. In my first year, I was taking full course load (5-6 graduate courses a semester - the amount of work required to validate a course changes depending on the university, but we were exposed to the same requirements as natives local students) and also in the first semester of my last year. On top of that, the program isn't course based: I am expected to write research thesis - deadline: 5th of June. On top of that, all my course work is in French or German. The program has been a slap in the face and I think I'm suffering from a form of linguistic schizophrenia because of it. But I've learned much. I'm not sure if the Europhilosophie program is really indicative of what other EM programs are like. I haven't met many people doing other ones, so I can't really say.
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Thanks! They certainly didn't mention anything of the sort concerning the Taylor fellowship. I wonder who got it this year!
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Whoops, forgot to put in that: philosophy, will be starting my PhD at McGill in September.
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Letter just came in France! The wait is finally over! A-category scholarship. Score: 28.8/30. MA-SSHRC Erasmus Mundus from the European Commission Some graduate prizes and awards. Research languages: English, French, German, Italian My MA thesis not only won the University Medal for a Thesis-Program (on Zizek, not sure how that even happened - but I find it an amusing fact), but was since reworked into a forthcoming 300 page book. Three articles in international referred journals. Two invited book chapters. Eight conference presentations (mainly graduate level). Two plenary sessions. Some translations. I also had a letter of reference from a well-known specialist in Germany philosophy and translator of German philosophy from France.
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Yeah, I'm asking myself the same thing. I even have friends in Montreal I could have had it send to, so I could have gotten it much earlier (being from Newfoundland). At least there is solidarity in mutual suffering, right?
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I haven't looked at my SSHRC proposal since I sent it off. I mean, if I converted the amount of times I reread that thing into a quantity of pages, I'm sure I have a year of research.... If I looked at it once more, my brain might explode!
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Nothing in France either. Mail just came.
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I know in the committee of selection for one of the programs here (as the present of a student organization, I get to participate in it), there are two stages of evaluation. First, all applicants receive a number grading (out of 70). This is the number that they use to build an initial list of award recipients. Usually two people evaluate the application in detail, but everyone reads it. Second, there is a discussion based on the proposed list. Here, people would argue why a certain candidate was too high in the list or why they should be given the award instead of another. In this way, only the first two or three candidates were considered automatic (because people didn't have any complaints about them). Afterwards, a lot of moving occurred - which led to the effect that people with higher evaluations were often lower on the list, or were replaced by someone who didn't even appear as a possibility for the wait list according to the initial list (for instance, there was one student with two MAs, a substantial amount of publications, and ok references; although ranked 4 or 5 on the original list, he ended up being put on the wait list and his spot was given to a student from Africa who just had finished his BA, with no publications, but whose letter of references, from professors who were known by the committee, said that he was without a doubt the best student that had had in the past decade, and absolutely deserves the award - with the added detail that he was able to keep his near perfect jobs while working full-time to support himself). I suspect something similar happens.
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Nothing in France either!
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Oh dear, all I need is another reason to spend more time fantasizing about what I would do with all of that money!
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I'm a direct applicant and I also only have a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement form available. Kind of doubt that means anything. But I doubt it means much. Wouldn't we have to accept an offer before any of this becomes available?
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For a moment I was thinking maybe I misread and it was actually two pages. Maybe the question is in what detail did they pay attention to things such as you sourcing your own work and the that these sourced works were not repeated in your Research Contribution. Who knows! But I too am rather curious about how much the Research Contribution would play a role, since given that yours appears to be rather substantial (even for someone already significantly along the way in their PhD) one would think it would merit more. It would seem that, though they obviously play a role, they maybe are more interested in the proposed research project, or that in your committee there was just extreme levels of competition.
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Placebased, how did you even fit all of those things into the maximum one page Research Contribution? I was only able to fit 18 things in total (and that was a tight fit), but you just mentioned 36.
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Nor anything in France.
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I just want to be in an artificial coma until the letter arrives. Is that so much to ask? I should have gotten them to send the letter to a family member in Canada - waiting in France is going to be a pain in the ass.
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So, let me get this straight: They can tell us that they sent the results by means of the internet, but they cannot tell us - even informally - of the results by internet?
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http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/fellowships/cgs_masters-besc_maitrise-eng.aspx#a6 Does this imply that even at the level of the national competition, academic excellence still plays 60% of the decision making process? that, so to speak, the entire process takes place from the ground up with the A-list?
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I think publications do play an important role, but I know that they do not expect students - especially does just beginning a PhD - to have a considerable amount. I think they are more concerned with finding serious students committed to their research and who can prove themselves capable of independent, original thinking; and, naturally, research contributions can certainly be an indicator of that. Naturally it will depend on the field - but at any rate a student with three solid article publications, a book chapter, or what not, probably will have an easy job convincing them of their abilities. At any rate, academics are expected to produce knowledge. In short, though they can be important, I don't think they expect the impossible. Naturally, it does depend on the proposal. If the proposed research is not going in a good direction, then it either meant that the person was too lazy to write something comprehensible, too confident in their own abilities to actually think it was necessary to convince those evaluating his or her file, or perhaps just picked a topic that is not considered worthwhile or is already overdone by bad chance. One of my old professors takes part in (or at least did) the committee of selection and he told me once that one year they turned down what should have been one of the best candidates. The guy had a near perfect track record, a lot of publications, was going to a prestigious university, already had relatively important research contributions in journals, etc., but the research proposal just talked about him- or herself and his or her past accomplishments and smacked of arrogance.
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Decaf, I understand all too well. I was thinking of getting the results mailed to my parents, but I decided the extra day or two would be less stressful to see the document with my own eyes.
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I think I have a pretty good chance since my track record is ok. I have a number of publications and conference presentations under my belt and my references should be good (plus one was written by a leading specialist and translator of German philosophy in France). Sadly one article which was a preliminary sketch of the theoretical model I will be using in my thesis was accepted for publication a month after I the applications were due. Tough luck. One thing, however, could go against me: the major idea was to argue for the "relevance" of Hegel's philosophy of nature. A lot of Hegelians and philosophers would consider that idea as outright absurd and not even bother to understand the specific way in which I think it is (which has nothing to do with scientific content, but the idea of nature). I managed, however, to show a growing interest in the international literature on this topic and show that no one has really devoted an entire monograph to the precise problematic I outlined. That all being said, DAAD rejected my application. So, let's see.
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Maybe we should just create voodoo dolls of those in charge to make them feel what we are feeling.
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So if you don't get any news, does that mean you have to drink both insofar as you will be stuck in the undecidable state of the insupportable in-between?
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I don't trust the French post to send me mine in a speedy fashion.
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The solution is to just keep drinking.
