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Guavanaut posted:Normally around being bottled. Last week the administration of the university I teach at did an abrupt 180 and announced that due to the A-level fiasco, they were expecting ~25% more students than usual and were concerned that in-person teaching would not be safe. Their solution was to phase in in-person teaching, with most non-lab classes first meeting physically in early October. I reckon at this rate that by then, following the first major outbreak, they'll simply opt to keep teaching online-only for the rest of the semester.
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Sep 7, 2020 16:24
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Lol in other news the bbc has a story about how we've locked up 500 uni freshers in a building for 2 weeks. I'm a faculty member at St Andrews and despite Fife and Tayside being pretty good generally in terms of COVID spread since March in the last two weeks we've had 50+ students in quarantine at St Andrews and now 500 at Abertay University. And we're still slated to return to in-person teaching in two weeks.
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Sep 23, 2020 09:04
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Just wrote up a full reply on the university situation that got eaten... Long story short, as someone speaking from the other side, things are really poo poo right now for a lot of lecturers, but they're even worse for students, and you have every right to be pissed off if faculty members aren't doing what they're required to do. Polite hounding is the way to go. Funny enough, I've had the opposite experience so far this semester as I have a reduced teaching load and was assigned one MA student to supervise but I've had to hound her just to get signs of life... Pandemic aside, this also gets at one of the issues I have with the UK postgraduate system, which is that the MA is too insubstantial as a degree. Obviously this varies by discipline, but in my opinion it either needs to be a more substantial two-year program, or it needs to be more pragmatically-focused, like postbacs in the US. But that's a whole other can of worms.
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Oct 15, 2020 08:17
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Borrovan posted:Certainly from where I'm standing, hard disagree. Of course I agree that the real problem is the administration, and the piecemeal implementation of crucial pedagogical and administrative changes through millions of random emails makes it all but impossible to actually follow along with what's happening, but I was referring specifically to this and similar statements: quote:Feels like I have to chase these fuckers at every turn. A week in and the only contact I've had from my personal tutor is a generic email he clearly sends to everybody with a suggestion for a zoom meeting that he didn't even turn up for lol. The absolute minimum right now all faculty members should be doing is answering emails and showing up to zoom meetings with mentees. Yes, we're all overwhelmed, and we might not know why that lecture we recorded on Panopto doesn't have any sound or why the cameras the university installed in all classrooms only seem capable of filming a third of a room at most, but the bottom line is that we can and should be reaching out to students for whom we have pastoral responsibilities.
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Oct 15, 2020 09:13
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knox_harrington posted:I always find it jarring to see how many US doctors are chuds. Particularly in the UK most of the medical profession seems a bit lefty or at least centrist, but working with US docs and reading r/medicine there's a huge FYGM mindset. This has everything to do with attitudes towards socialised medicine. In the US, many people think of being doctor the same way they do being a lawyer -- it's a prestigious, highly paid profession, and if you happen to do some good as one, that's a bonus, but ultimately secondary. In countries where people know going in that they're going to be working within a socialised medical system, they tend to think of it in more balanced terms. This is my experience as a Canadian having lived in both the US and UK for some time and known medical professionals in all three countries, at any rate.
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Oct 18, 2020 12:00
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Tenant question: My wife and I just moved out of a furnished property in the Midlands we'd been renting for two years after the landlord evicted us in order to sell it. She wrote the lease as a House Share Agreement that states that "there is no intention on behalf of the Landlord or the Sharer to create a full tenancy and as such the Agreement is regulated as a licence." We initially shared the house with her, but over time she spent more and more time at her boyfriend's place until she'd effectively moved out. She's generally been a poo poo landlord the whole time we were there, rarely responding to texts and neglecting basic fixes we'd requested for months. When she did fix things, she did it herself on the cheap and often things broke again or got worse as a result. We tolerated this, though, because our rent was low and we only had to put down a £300 deposit. We took really good care of the place and didn't make a fuss about the eviction, noting to her some minor damage to a wall and a door that went beyond normal wear and tear. Now she's come back with a bullshit list of costs that she's taking out of our deposit including £60 to clean an oven (it was disgusting when we moved in, and we cleaned it pretty regularly, but there's only so much you can do), and over £100 to replace pots and pans, and £90 to replace an old vacuum that was so poo poo when we moved in that we used it a handful of times before buying our own. We didn't do a walkthrough when we moved in, and she didn't take pictures of anything to our knowledge when we moved in, and now she's sending us pictures of stuff that was already well worn when we moved in and claiming it's beyond fair wear and tear. My wife and I are new to tenancy laws here, so what can we do?
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Oct 30, 2020 12:43
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Thanks, everyone, for the advice. We'd just moved to the UK when we moved into this place and we were desperate to find something. We've written back to the landlord with a reasonable point-by-point response, so we'll see what she says.quote:This guidance from Shelter may help: https://england.shelter.org.uk/hous...renting/lodgers. There is a tenancy rights checker tool on there which you can use. It sounds like you were lodgers. I would check Shelter's guidance and probably go back to her disputing the costs and setting out your reasons in writing. Then see what she comes back with, and threatening to take her to small claims court if she still won't give back the deposit. It sounds like legally we're lodgers with a licence agreement, but google searchers provide ambiguous results when it comes to our legal rights surrounding a damage deposit. If we didn't have exclusive access to the property, and thus never had an official tenancy, does that mean we have no legal right to challenge her keeping the deposit? Mega Comrade posted:Did you take pictures when you moved in? No, because we didn't do a walk through with pictures taken. My wife and I are Canadian and the tenancy laws we've always lived under stipulate that if you don't do a walk through, the landlord can't hold you responsible for wear and tear. Is the legal onus not on the landlord to demonstrate the state of the property before a tenant moves in, for comparative purposes? quote:Was your deposit held in a deposit scheme? I don't think so, since we just gave her a cheque for the amount. Does this give us any legal standing? quote:Had she, or hadn't she? A tenancy agreement is defined by exclusive possession, not by the label attached by the parties. Exclusive possession is defined as the right to exclude all others, including the landlord, which kinda sounds like a circular definition but essentially she can't claim some bullshit reason why she was still entitled to be there, if she had actually moved out there's a good chance you were actually tenants in the eyes of the law. For the last year she's kept a bedroom in the house but hasn't been living there and only returned to pick things up or drop them off in storage once every 2-3 months. She hasn't been using the property in any other way but did keep a set of keys.
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Oct 30, 2020 13:40
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Rental dispute update: My wife and I were living as lodgers under a licence agreement in the house of our landlord and we were evicted with a month's notice a bit over a month ago. Our landlord moved out in the course of our time renting but we never legally had exclusive occupancy of the unit. We were really good tenants who put a lot of time and effort into maintaining the property while the landlord was generally unresponsive and didn't maintain or fix many basic elements of the house that we repeatedly requested she fix (such as a heat pump, sink, and toilet), so we were surprised when after moving out she sent us a list of bullshit charges including £60 to clean the oven which we had cleaned to a reasonable standard, and £90 to replace her busted rear end vacuum that we had used a handful of times before buying our own. In the end of the email, she condescendingly claimed that we actually owed her more than our £300 deposit, but that she was willing to call it even. Because we were moving from the Midlands to Scotland, she clearly thought we wouldn't be willing to put the time and effort in to challenge her. After not responding to our texts and emails disputing these deductions, I sent a formal email notifying her that we would be filing a claim in small claims court. She sent a response within a couple of hours sending us the money along with what I can only describe as a tirade calling us nasty and dishonest and listing a bunch of tiny petty complaints that she was kind enough to not go after us for. Thanks for all the advice! Feels good to win one now and then 
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Nov 1, 2020 16:42
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CGI Stardust posted:I've just started using Zotero and oh my god is it easier than tracking all that bullshit by hand Zotero is really good. My friend recommended I start using it when I just started on my dissertation and I'm so thankful I did, since my works cited ended up including almost 1300 entries.
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Nov 23, 2020 20:41
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This may be a hot take, but UK postgrads generally aren't long enough. I'm sorry, but 3-4 years is not nearly enough time to become a well-rounded expert in most disciplines, especially if you expect to go on to teach. My US PhD took 7 years and there are still areas of my specialty I'm not totally comfortable teaching or know very little about. Edit: This is from a humanities-social science perspective, btw.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:23
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feedmegin posted:...it's not intended to be a teaching qualification though? Teaching is a major component of a PhD most of the time. But 3-4 years also isn't enough time to become an expert in a field, outside of one very narrow slice of it.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:29
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vodkat posted:This is true but at least in the uk you are only made to be a peon with a poo poo wage and no job prospects for three years rather than spending the better part of a decade of being shat on even more for less in the us I guess it depends on the programme but most higher-end humanities/social sciences PhD programmes in the US provide more funding to their students than their UK counterparts.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:33
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feedmegin posted:Not in my wife's it wasn't. We don't use doctoral students as cheap academic labour as much here (that comes later). Different model. I'm at a UK institution, and every postgrad has to teach after their first year. It varies from university to university, but that's actually also my point -- PhD programmes outside of STEM fields (and even in those fields too, I don't know) that don't prepare you for teaching aren't doing a good job.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:47
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knox_harrington posted:Not really true in the UK. Which is part of my point. Again, this is coming at it from a humanities/social science perspective, but if your PhD programme isn't preparing you to teach, they're not preparing you to be a professional. All joking about job market woes aside, doing a PhD in those disciplines means preparing to be in academia, and getting paid to be an academic almost always requires some form of teaching. Jaeluni Asjil posted:We didn't have to teach at all. It was entirely up to each student how much seminar/tutorial/exercise class/marking they did. The students with wealthy parents normally did none at all. Again, this just reinforces my point.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:55
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vodkat posted:The difference here is in the detail (this is academia hur hur). Most uk phds will teach but will be employed by the university in a fixed term contract, you apply for the job and sign a contract for x many hours. You can join a union, you can resign or not work, you can choose which course you apply to work on as a teacher. In the US working is normally a requirement of your stipend. No teach equals no PhD. And negotiations over hours or joining a union? You will be laughed out the door if not thrown out for even daring to question arbitrary labour choices hoisted onto you. And they are often very unreasonable, so even if stipends look bigger from afar the reality is they can be far stingier than the already measly ones in the UK. I’m well aware of the differences, having tried to unionize at my PhD institution and then striking recently at the UK institution I’m at now. I think on average UK stipends may be comparable to US stipends, but in high-end programmes the difference in stipends is significant.
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Nov 24, 2020 00:16
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CancerCakes posted:The purpose of a PhD is the absolute opposite of this though, you are still in the early narrowing specialisation and learning your craft period of academia, the broadening of scope and teaching generally comes later in the UK. See I find this attitude kind of bizarre. UK PhDs are often competing in an international academic market against their peers from the US who absolutely are expected to be experts in their field after 2-3 years of intensive postgrad coursework plus exams followed by 3-4 years of diss research and writing.
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Nov 24, 2020 00:19
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Savoury pies other than shepherd’s pot pies are uncommon in North America, but sausage rolls aren’t, though they’re not eaten quite as much in the US or Canada as in the UK. Scotch eggs are really unusual though. Even though they taste pretty good I’m always weirded out seeing someone just lay into one in a pub and all the mess that usually makes.
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Nov 30, 2020 14:28
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WhatEvil posted:I haven't knowingly seen sausage rolls but I'm vegetarian so they're not something I look for. In Canada sausage rolls are most commonly served as non-fancy finger food. People will pick them up from Costco or Canadian Superstore and serve them when guests come over, or during low-key events.
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Nov 30, 2020 18:13
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