And by the "Other Side," I really mean "The Dark Side."
Anyway, today I was an Internal Examiner in a defense of a doctoral thesis. This was my first time on this side of the table, and I have apparently perfected my scowl so that the student doesn't know what I am thinking about his answer (or thinks that I am thinking the worst). Though I wasn't doing that on purpose --- it's just the way I look when I'm really concentrating on something.
I needed to dress up in full academic regalia (white tie, gown, weird scarf thingy whose name I can't remember, and hat), though thankfully I didn't need to keep my hat on during the exam. Because of my hair's current length, it wouldn't stay on anyway and somehow the one that was "fitted" for me is too large for my head (though given more time in Oxford I fully expect the size of my head to expand accordingly).
The topic of the dissertation concerned complex networks and the relevant subtopics allowed me to bring up a lot of the usual suspects -- including generating functions (my fondness for which dates all the way back to my junior year... just ask the people who took my probability course what they think about generating functions!), modularity, a dig on a certain professor in the networks business who is a bit of an easy target, and so on. (It was also relevant to bring up interesting things like contact matrices.)
The Exam took 3 hours. The student passed and now just needs to correct some stuff on his thesis and he'll be done with this business. I didn't try to make things painful, but then when the student came back in, the External Examiner and I were apparently less clear than I thought about explaining that we only wanted "Minor Corrections" so the student was apparently worried for about 10 minutes that he'd have to defend again. (Oops! Sorry about that!)
2 days ago
3 comments:
Hey Mason, are the proceedings of vivas at Oxford public knowledge? Cause as vague as you are, that's a lot more than is discussed (other than by the viva-ed student) here at Bristol.
Hey Mason, are the proceedings of vivas at Oxford public knowledge? Cause as vague as you are, that's a lot more than is discussed (other than by the viva-ed student) here at Bristol.
I think I am fine at the level I commented.
The results are all official things that one can ask, as are the contents of the thesis itself.
And the questions I asked were buzzwords that were clear to ask just given the thesis topic.
Though if the student hadn't done well, I wouldn't be commenting but for very different reasons.
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