回复: 如何才能静下心来学英语？
老外认为这是幽默.而你认为讽刺.看看下面的文章.
PhD - A Degree in Permanent Head Damage (In a Lighter Mood)
By Elimma C. Ezeani
A PhD is a suspicious degree. It demands too much but its immediate rewards are more apparent than real. It is like a bad mistress or a controlling lover; it consumes your life and for as long as you do not diligently seek to detangle yourself from its clutches, it will entwine its arms around you for an inordinate length of time as long as your self-discipline or your terms of enrolment allow, whichever is greater. It will make enemies out of the friends you have no time to visit and friends out of the ‘boring’ people you always claimed you disliked until you realised how intelligent they were. And yet, because you have made a promise to journey along to a PhD for the next years of your life, you keep smiling and reading. Until you become one of those strange people no one likes to sit with in the library because you mumble to yourself.
The obvious role model for this journey with a PhD will be your supervisor. With this individual, as with a spouse, you will carry on a love-hate relationship matched with a determination that the relationship will never be brought to an end through your own fault. No.
Your supervisor is likely to be a harried looking academic fighting it out in the status-driven world of academia, plotting how they can be the first to publish an exciting paper in a peer-reviewed journal. S/he will probably have a distinctive appearance; they will look as if their entire lives have been spent struggling to make an impression on a world that doesn’t appreciate their efforts. They may dress in clothes which you suspect could have been the product of a bad
tie-dye experiment.
Your supervisor may be a tyrant, a slave driver, a narcissistic individual who will never respond to any correspondence or communication if their name is not prefixed with the appropriate title. But you may be lucky. You may find yourself with the coveted specie of supervisor those who despite any eccentricities remain genuinely interested in you and your work. Depending on how you see it, you could also run the risk of having a supervisor who is a fulfilment of your every fantasy. If you were a married man you would understand this; she could be the kind of woman whom you will never be able to fully describe to your wife. When you are asked about her, you will lapse into vague mumbles and quickly ask about your dinner. It is better that people think you can’t bear talking about your supervisor, than that they know you can’t get her out of your thoughts.
Bear in mind that your supervisor is the most important person in your world during the PhD. They are your spiritual guides. Even if there is someone else whom you would rather have had, perhaps your colleague’s supervisor, it is best to keep this desire firmly under control just as you would an immoral longing to covet another’s spouse/goods.
Try to stay in their good books. If they like smoking, this is not the time to pull out your health pamphlets or to send them online articles about cancer. If they enjoy sports, start thinking of appropriate sweat-inducing activities. If they are petty and fussy, indulge them. If their attitude to life is frankly unbearable to a good religious person like your self, have you been told that charity covers a multitude of sins? Learn to ‘love’ your supervisor with their faults; it may be your key to the kingdom of passing your
viva voce. This is no time to engage in long spiritual admonitions and to drop religious tracts into their post box, or to point out that they are on the toll-free road to hell.
Be careful however that you don’t over-compensate. Never forget that they are intelligent people and unlike mere mortals, will not be easily deceived.
As you adjust to who your role model is and how you may relate with them, the real work continues. Reading. Writing. More reading. More writing. Meanwhile, an avalanche of problems which has been waiting in the wings finally bears down on you. Your supervisor disappears. You haven’t paid your full fees and you get suspended. Your girl friend leaves you. Your fiancé ponders how he can compete with ‘a PhD’ and decides he needs space to ‘reassess this relationship’. The next thing you hear, his wife is pregnant. Your lab space is taken over by a new researcher. Your chemicals give off the wrong results. Your computer can’t find your documents. You get sick. You get broke. Your bosses suggest you are not paying ‘full attention’ to your work.
Your husband suspects you are cheating on him with your supervisor and colleagues. Your wife nags that you don’t go to church anymore. Your relatives remind you that ‘all book and no time for family’ makes them a very angry lot. You mean you won’t come home for Christmas again this year? You suspect they are secretly planning your funeral seven years already and they haven’t seen you alive. No; they don’t trust your phone calls anymore; how can they without evidence? You haven’t sent money to them in a long time.
Your social groups are considering striking your name off the register. Your dues come in late and besides you are never available for meetings. Friends who bother to keep in touch wonder why you haven’t finished. Surely you’re not the only one studying? For the millionth time, you explain to them that their neighbour’s degree is different from yours. Do they care?
In a bid to stay connected in a world you have no time for, you decide to start an online blog. That is, if you are in an environment where this is possible. Hopefully someone is interested in reading about you and about your vague sojourn into a world no one else can connect with. After a week you realise no one checks. Desperate, you begin to re-read your blog entries and tell your friends to check them out. If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed…Then you go on the other sites facebook and the rest of them. Within two weeks you realise you have spent more time looking at pictures of others having a good time and have neglected your work.
Brought back to your senses, you resume worshipping at the Holy Library. If you have to, you draft research questionnaires and send them out. You are lucky; every single one of them comes back to you. Some return as the wrapping for your fried yams and plantain which you sent for from the kiosk down the road; the rest you find in a carton outside your flat mate’s door, marked ‘rubbish’. You may be lucky if you sent them far and wide. A few return unanswered. If you are angry enough, you fake the results. Your supervisor has a look at your figures and does the math. Back to work again.
In the lab, your experiments should yield the new cure for ignorance. Instead, the lab attendant hands you a bill for the ‘control’ mice you privately hoped he would have picked up in the bushes behind the lab after you took him out for a drink two weeks ago. You know the ones you used for the main experiment were the product of a ‘hunt’ in the gutters at the back of your flats.
“Aren’t they wild rats” you ask, bewildered?
He stares at you in disbelief until he realises the problem. “In this country” he educates you with the look and pompous tones of one who has spent a considerable length of time with mice, “mice are protected species. Your illegal use has landed us with a warning order from the society for prevention of cruelty to mice and we may lose our grant for the next five years.” Helpless you look outside where the weather looks as downcast as your dead mice. Belatedly, you recall that you are in a different culture with a different consideration for animals.
Without warning, your supervisor quits his job with the university. You have an option; you can follow him. You decide to test your luck. Your new supervisor takes a look at what you have done so far and unapologetically discounts three hundred pages of neatly typed work. They may bother to let you know in a lazy scrawl that your work shows insufficient research and needs extensive revision. Or they may take a look at that equation you have finally solved after three years and then slide a slim journal towards you.
“See page three” they say with infuriating calmness, “that equation has been solved and published. Your work no longer makes an original contribution to knowledge.”
Please desist from arguing that you had no prior knowledge of this publication. If you do, they may ask that your credentials should be checked again to assess your suitability for a doctoral programme. You don't want this to happen.
When you finally manage, exhausted, spent and bereft of friends and enemies, to submit your work for examination, you are subjected to the academic version of an Inquisition. You defend your work so much that you even begin to doubt you wrote it yourself. Then the results come in. In rare cases, you will get a pat on the back and a hearty smile. Invariably, you may have to go back to the library. Go back to the lab. Cross check a reference. Remove some erroneous data. Amend a typographical error. Rewrite your conclusion. Or just redo the entire work.
If this happens, you will cry and blame everyone but yourself. The libraries which didn’t stay open. The wicked supervisor. Your horrible girlfriend. Your cheating fiancé. Your inconsiderate children. That distant relative who chose an inconvenient time to visit for three weeks. Your poor upbringing. Your friends who led you astray.
Depending on the academic environment you find yourself, you may curse the academic unions for their strike or rail against the government which can’t provide efficient social infrastructure. You may curse a culture which thinks more of dead wild mice than of your labourious experiments. Never mind that many are dying and suffering around the world, your unsuccessful oral examination is the worst thing at this point in human history.
Please just go back and do what you have to do. Don’t think you can cheat your way through it, not unless you want to live in the fear of being discovered. And there are enough permanently damaged heads in the real world checking the competition and carrying out extensive research on your claims to the title, ‘Doctor’.
Someday however, if you persist, it will be over.
And you?
Pressed down and wrung dry after all that palaver, you will find that you have become a different person. You may even slowly acquire your own weird habits. You can suddenly decide you must take out all the seats in your car and leave the driver’s seat alone. That way, people will no longer keep asking you for a lift. You may drive only in second gear to save fuel. You could even refuse to buy new clothes or use deodorants. You may consider keeping mice as pets because you do agree that killing innocent animals could destroy the eco-system or even turn mice into an endangered species. Even worse, you can become pompous, argumentative, and contemptuous of everyone around you that is, the very few who will choose to stick around someone who volunteers themselves for permanent head damage anyway.
Inevitably however, and this is the crucial part, you find that you begin to see things others don’t see… When people are content with vague answers, you demand clarity. When people are content to ‘do little’ you slave away. You question everything…you think differently. Behind all this you wonder….Are they right when they say that too much learning has made thee mad? Or are you truly a highly competent intellectual worthy of the highest recognition in the academic world of reason?
Whatever your answer may be, keep in mind that you are still a 'social being' and try to maintain your sanity by staying involved with life around you. Resist the urge to closet yourself in your one bedroom apartment or your mansion as the case may be. Learn to pretend not to know things understand that in spite of your hard work and your 'brains', sometimes ‘ignorance’ is a virtue, at least if it lulls people around you into believing that you are still human and don’t know everything - which is the truth anyway.
