Entered on 2001-12-06 at 8:37 a.m..
Research Training Program
I don't know why I let jerks bother me so much. Why do I put any stock into what they have to say about me? It happened again last night, and I have been rebuffing myself for it all night.
As a bit of background I need to explain where I was last night, and who the jerk is, which requires me to back up a little further. As part of the first year Ph.D. course here at Cranfield, all of the 1st year Ph.D.s are enrolled in a Research Training Program (sounds neat right), which is pretty much every other Wednesday. According to all of the advertising (i.e. the official Research Student Manual) these lectures are to begin at 2pm. Well this week the lecture was moved to 6-9pm and then to continue the next morning 9-12:30. Unfortunately I had a volleyball game that I had alread agreed to play in as, we weren't told about the new time until a week and a half before . Since half of our regular team are first year Ph.D.s, we were quite short on players. So it came down to me playing, or the team forfeiting. I agreed to play, and wrote the necessary powers that be, about the conflict. As a side note it should be mentioned that there aren't supposed to be any classes or tutorials Wednesday afternoon to allow for sports games.
Last night I had worked out that I would only miss about 40 minutes of this guy's speech. As a courtesy, I told him when I walked in that I would have to leave in 20 minutes and why.
Well he obviously wasn't too happy that I considered volleyball more important than his lecture, and proceeded to mention the fact that I had left to play everytime he referred to me for the rest of the evening. When I came back, everyone was just returning from dinner (so I really had only missed 30 minutes of his take on R&D management). We were then tasked with defining our IT. The other people on my team (we had been grouped upon entry) explained to me that our IT was what we were working towards. IT was what we could point to and say, yes I'm done now, I have earned my Ph.D. because I have my IT.
We all set eagerly to task trying to define an IT. My two other teamates were at the advantage of having very nicely defined Thesis topics (having applied for the Ph.D. under in response to those topics being offered!) I was struggling since I haven't really refined my topic enough, it was rather hard to quantify an IT. After much help, my team and I had come up with a reasonable IT or so we thought. Our task had been to boil our phd work down into one sentence. I wasn't extremely proud of my sentence, but it was good enough.
Eventually presenter asked if anyone needed any more help. I called him over, thinking that my sentence did indeed need help. Well from there on he began belittling everything I said. First he asked me to explain what my project was. I tried, but he stopped me short and said that he wasn't getting it. So I tried again, using very small, general words and lots of hand gestures to help explain some rather abstract concepts such as floating networks of planes managing their own separation. Before I managed to even finish, or present my first stab at a sentence and an IT. He informed me that as my topic was vague, and I couldn't quite explain it, I needed to spend a disproportionate amount of time on a litterature review, so that I could understand it, and walked off.
He then asked for volunteers and began to pick apart everyone's IT. Apparently he wanted the IT to be either the thesis or the Ph.D. And as most people who are full of themselves and their own self importance, everything that everyone said was wrong. He would then tell them why they were wrong and proceed to contradict himself on the next person. To top it off, as he was winding down he even mentioned that air transport girl, who left us to play volleyball, has a lot of thinking and work to do between now and tomorrow, because she cannot even explain her project to me.
I was hurt and livid at the same time. I didn't need an overpriced consultant to tell me that I hadn't narrowed my thesis topic yet. Nor did I need to be abused because of it, or the simple point that he couldn't understand my explanations. He had even flat out said when I began my explanation, that he would never get on an airplane with out a centralized ATC firmly established on the ground. I guess it just really hurt, because I had been working so hard over the past two days to focus my topic, and thought I had begun to make progress.
The good news is that most everyone else thought he was a pompous bastard as well, so we comiserated together.
This morning things were better, as I ignored almost all of his personal opinions.