>> LOL. Riiiight...
> 
> I'm serious. You're way too worried about this stuff.
> 
> Don't spend much money. Just get funding and go. You have no obligations 
> right now. It's the best time in your life to start something 
> questionable like this.

Hmm. It has a flavour.

I guess it's just that I've spent my entire life surrounded by people 
telling me how stupid I am, and generally failing at almost everything I 
try to do. And given that a PhD is something that only a tiny percantage 
of the population manage to get... it all sounds a little implausible to 
me, that's all.

>>> Plus, you'll meet girls. :-)
>>
>> Oh. My. GOD! >_<
>>
>> You cannot *possibly* expect me to take anything else you say 
>> seriously now, can you? :-P
> 
> Know what? My wife has a PhD too. Know where I met her?

Heh. What do you have a PhD *in* though?

I rather doubt there are many females who have a PhD in anything 
remotely related to computing. (I also couldn't help noticing how the 
OU's PhD prospectus didn't seem to contain *any* people younger than 35...)

>> Heh. Actually, a few weeks back I did look at MSRC. But I couldn't 
>> figure out what they were talking about. I surmised this probably 
>> means I'm too stupid to be there. :-}
> 
> No. It means you haven't done any sort of PhD work.
> 
> It's like saying "I don't want to go to school to study mathematics, 
> because every time I read a math paper I don't already understand it."

Like I say, I couldn't figure out the application process. Maybe because 
I don't have a clear idea of how this stuff is supposed to work...

>> That's pretty impressive, right there.
> 
> But that's how it works.

Heh. I can believe it.

> By the time I started actually writing the 
> thesis, I'd already published papers in three or four journals, been to 
> two countries on the school's money presenting the papers, and 
> peer-reviewed other papers about vaguely similar topics. You meet people 
> at these things, and they're expensive, so you get the school to pay for 
> it.

That's pretty impressive... I've spent years writting silly scraps of 
text, but I've never yet managed to write "a paper".

>> Taking a PhD for no apparent reason is slightly crazy, but I'm 
>> gradually coming around to the idea. Leaving the UK is an absurd idea. 
>> :-P
> 
> It's not "no apparently reason."  Think of it like taking a job doing 
> something fun, for not quite as much money as you might like, but 
> probably still more than you're making now. :-)

Well, if you put it like that... ;-)

> Why is leaving the UK for a few years absurd?

I think spending all day in a brand new, possibly hostile environment is 
quite enough to be dealing with, without living in a completely random 
country on top of all that. (Quite apart from the fact that I have no 
desire to leave the UK in the first place.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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