• ArbitraryValue
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    2 days ago

    Dissertation? This grad student has his own personal office? With a door? I wasn’t even issued a chair. I had to get my own.

    As for dogs: when I was in grad school, one of the professors had a dog that sat quietly next to his desk all day, at least as far as the professor knew. When he went to the bathroom, his dog would run into the hall and play with people, but the dog was listening for his footsteps and was always back in his office in time. This didn’t last long because the department head didn’t like dogs and complained :(

    • me_jumper@infosec.pub
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      2 days ago

      I’m doing my PhD in Germany, everyone here is employed with salary and has a 1-3 people office. At least in computer science.

      • ArbitraryValue
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        2 days ago

        I did a science PhD so I also got paid, enough to live modestly but comfortably. I shared an office with four other people but it was a big office. The incident with the chair probably had more to do with the struggle between the professors and the university to avoid paying for things like that than it did with an absolute lack of funds.

        • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          All of the grad students in my department - ten or twelve? - along with the few undergrads we had assisting our program - had to share a single medium-sized room, with no assigned seating. At least they had shared computers at every other seat. Sadly, I don’t recall the chair situation.

          • ArbitraryValue
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            1 day ago

            no assigned seating

            One professor in my department was so protective of her lab’s space that when she noticed me sitting at a desk assigned to one of her students, she went and complained directly to my advisor. The desk’s owner was a friend of mine and on a month-long international trip at that time and I wasn’t even making a habit of using his desk - it was just a convenient place to sit while talking to another one of her students.

            How did you guys share computers? My work was 100% on the computer so we would have had to work in shifts if there had not been enough computers for everyone (but there were).

            • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              I had a very fancy portable hard drive using the brand-new USB protocol that could power itself from the PS/2 port.

    • nimpnin@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      When I started my phd (in a different country, during late covid times) my only collegue who would have sat in my room always worked from home. It wasn’t very fun at all. Well, very few people came to the office anyways, so I just had to try and figure out everything by myself, eat lunch alone, etc. etc.

      I am so much happier now in a 4 person room where I have 1-3 collegues to talk to depending on the day.

      • ArbitraryValue
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        1 day ago

        Having a private office would be a nice symbol of status but I don’t think I’d actually enjoy working in one - in grad school, I was really happy in my shared office since the other guys there were my friends. I graduated a year after them and that last year was not fun. Of course new people took their spots but those people were strangers to me.

      • Ech@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        They never claimed it was their office, the poster did.

        • shneancy@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          oh you’re right. sorry i’ve gotten into a habit of ignoring the “black text on white background above the actual picture” part of memes as half the time it’s either “nobody:” or a variant on “this is so funny!”

    • ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com
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      1 day ago

      I have an office at my university but we had to apply for it and only get it for two years. It’s pretty nice, maybe 7x7 with a desk, chair, and bookshelves.

      • P00ptart@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Jesus christ, 7x7? I got my bachelor’s , did the things you’re supposed to do, and when I found out what that life was like, I quit and became a forklift operator at a union job making more money, with better co-workers and less stress. I have little to no structure or micro-managing, don’t feel caged, I’m given the freedom and trust to manage myself, don’t deal with inane BS like meetings that have nothing to do with me, no stress whatsoever, when I leave those doors, im a free man. It infuriates me that I’m still paying for that bullshit paper that I’m not using, simply because older family members said I had to. Fuck.

        After the boomers, none of us really stood a chance at fixing things, because we were raised by broken people. Broken people break other people in different ways than they were broken. That generation (as a whole, I know I’m generalizing, which is bad, I recognize there are a lot of amazing boomer parents and otherwise good influences) but in my personal experience, I’ve had FAR more friction with boomers than any other generation, by a VERY wide margin. It happens to such a degree that I sometimes question if I’m the problem. Then I get yelled at by some fat, bald guy with a goatee while I’m walking my dog, for him smelling the flowers around a tree between the road and sidewalk. Which is city property. Also, he always poops and pees before we go for the walk, so that wasn’t an issue either. This guy was just a dickhead trying to assert some kind of power because he was unhappy in life. I’ll give you one guess which flag he actually had ABOVE the American flag. That was before the election. The flag is now gone, but… I know where it was.

        Holy shit I went off on a tangent lol. My apologies for my rant. The axe never remembers, the tree never forgets.

    • ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 day ago

      It’s normal in my university. I have a 2 person office. The other guy rarely comes, so it’s basically a one person office. I thought most people have an office during PhD. Maybe it’s varies by country?

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      How do you get the impression that this is a grad student?

      Your comment does remind me of the time I visited a CS grad student at a local university for some programming tutoring in the mid-90s. He had an office! It was about the size of a closet, but there was a door and everything.

      • ArbitraryValue
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        2 days ago

        How do you get the impression that this is a grad student?

        He’s working on his dissertation.

        Now that I think about it some more, I do recall seeing places where grad students did have their own personal closets…

            • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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              1 day ago

              Thanks. Somehow my brain just kept sliding right over that word even after re-reading it multiple times. What the fuck is up with that?