#and tangentially starting thinking about how much asks/submissions have changed in recent years

[lovely-english-rose]

when did the tumblr culture around asks change so much? ive been thinking about it alot recently and its something i already do think about time to time, like... what happened? they used to be such a huge part of the community and suddenly fell off.

i think in 2024 maybe we should work to bring back the larger ask culture. start more random conversations with others, create and share more ask games, maybe say something nice to the people you follow, drop off a silly meme or just pop in and say hi!

[qqueenofhades]

I recently submitted my first ever article and it got accepted provided I change "some minor things" aka the entire article... Awful, 0/10, is it always like that? 💀💀💀

...okay y'all, buckle up, I'm about to tell you my worst academic horror story. Aka why academia is a terrible, awful, no good very bad idea and you should never do it. If you've been following me for a long time, you may remember parts of this, but yes.

Anyway, so in the UK university system, which is where I did my PhD, you don't have a thesis committee; you have two examiners, one internal (a member of the department in your home university, but who didn't supervise you or advise you) and one external (a senior academic from an outside university who hasn't seen your work before and wasn't involved in the process in any way). My supervisors and I had a little trouble finding an external examiner, as the guy that we first asked didn't think he was a good fit, and then we found a replacement: a senior female scholar at a fairly good university in Ireland, who shall both, for the purposes of this cautionary tale, Remain Unnamed. She had worked with my supervisor before, they were friends, and he thought that she would be a suitable replacement choice. As for my thesis, my supervisors both thought it was pretty much done and hence ready for formal submission and viva (the oral examination). So! We submitted it!

My viva was duly scheduled, I turned up on the day already nervous as hell, and then things started going, hmm, slightly downhill. It soon became apparent that my external examiner thought my thesis was about something else, subject-wise, than it actually was (aka the subject SHE worked on, not the one I did) and she kept asking questions that were only tangentially related and demanding to know why I hadn't included all this background/genealogical/family information. (Where might I find it, you ask? Oh, in her book!) My internal examiner was mostly fine and made a few comments about how I needed to beef up my critical commentary on this or that charter source, and move some things from the conclusion to the introduction. You know! NORMAL things that a NON-PSYCHOTIC PERSON would suggest after reading a 300-page doctoral thesis that was clearly on the topic that it was about! NO BIG DEAL!!!

They sent me out of the room to debate whether they were going to pass me or not, while I had a heart attack and they took forever, and finally called me back in to say that okay, they were going to approve it, But External Examiner Had Questions!!! I was just relieved that I wasn't going to suddenly fail my PhD at the last hurdle after four years of work, but to say the least, extremely shell-shocked. I went out kind of in a daze, and my supervisor pulled me into his office for a congratulatory drink of champagne and told me that he'd never had any doubts it was going to be fine and etc. He also offered to refer the thesis to the series that he edited at a major academic press, in order to be published as a monograph. I don't remember how much I said, but I don't think it was much, and he seemed a little puzzled that I was looking like I'd just been hit by a tornado. Was this the end of the saga, you ask? No, of course not!!!

Anyway, if you request corrections to a thesis, you're supposed to submit them within a very abbreviated timeframe: by the end of the week, so the candidate (me) has as much time to work on them as possible. My internal examiner submitted a sensible one-page list of suggested edits within two days. We couldn't get hold of my external examiner for ALMOST THREE WEEKS (close to a MONTH). Then she sent these absolutely batshit endless lists of barely comprehensible corrections that read like total rambling, which neither me nor either of my supervisors (so, two-and-almost three PhDs between us) could understand. My main supervisor was so horrified by how unprofessional and inexplicable this was that he literally offered to read through all them and try to turn them into something that I could actually use. I was already working on the other ones, and wrote a passive-aggressive line into my introduction throwing major academic shade about how This Thesis Is About This Subject, Not That One. The reason this line exists in the world is due to my absolutely psychotic external examiner, so.... yes.

Tl;dr: happy ending, my internal examiner was the one solely responsible for signing off on the corrections and was happy to do so, I passed and graduated, and then did more revisions on my thesis to turn it into a book. I submitted it to the academic press for another external expert to read and was absolutely braced for another total nightmare. Instead, he basically came back with "this is great and I can't think of anything!" and thus I made a few quick tweaks and it went off to be published. So boy, was I ever owed that karma.