More Postgrad nonsense!
Even though I had already sought potential, prospective supervisors with whom to do a PhD over 2 years previously, and had come up with very good, original proposals, my pre-applications for a supervisor didn't go as well as I expected. 😟 Nonetheless, in 2016, I accepted a sudden invitation to apply for a M.Res in Europe. At this stage, I had already written and presented one paper which I had thought up, researched and written as a solo work and submitted 2 detailed, long abstracts to 2 other conferences, one on Spinoza the other on Shepherd in the autumn of 2015.🙂
It should have been straightforward. 🙂 I filled in the relevant details on my online application system, fulfilled most of the necessary sections including my transcript document of the official breakdown of my exam marks, which they didn't understand anyway 🤦(they didn't even know what a 2:1 degree means or how to convert UK grade marks into their grades - so much for being in the EU!) in addition to scanned copies of my British passport and my degree certificate.
The only necessary sections I couldn't do was one, uploading marked essays and two, uploading references. A technical hitch meant I couldn't upload my marked work 🙄 so in order to hand it in on time I had to email my essays to their admin staff which I did using my own personal email. I wonder what happened to those essays. 🤔
My interview was via Skype with three lecturers from different aspects of philosophy e.g. History of Philosophy, Theoretical Philosophy (metaphysics) and Practical Philosophy (ethics, politics). The interview went well except a technical hitch meant they apparently couldn't see me. 👀
So all that was left was the references, which I had secured back in 2014 from two male lecturers. The system with the university I'd applied to was that I was required to upload two academic references myself onto my online application site which included my private details, including ID. However, both refused to provide me with their reference 😠so I could upload them myself. This meant I could not complete this required field by the end date.😩Their excuses were feeble so I could only assume the worst! References are supposed to be transparent and available for the person to read so a referee who has a problem with this is very odd. 😟One referee was apparently on paternity leave but I fail to see how that incapacitates him from writing a few lines on a computer and emailing them to me. He was both tutor and marker in my 4th year and had known I'd be asking for a reference since he agreed to do so over 2 years prior so should have had one already written and ready to send me. However, this referee did come through with the reference and let me know by email he had done so! So I was very surprised when almost immediately afterwards the uni rejected my application citing no references as a reason. This was blatantly not true. Hence, I instantly responded by email to the chair (of the department to which I was applying) to say that one of my referees had responded with a reference as soon as his paternity leave ended. I reminded the chair that I had warned him this might happen since the referee was on leave, especially given that he had not stated what the deadline was for references when I'd asked him previously by email.
The other referee (second referee) was just plain rude, attacked my character by insinuating I was lying 😠about how I needed to submit references because he hadn't ( in his narrow experience) come across such a system, that I was too stupid to understand how things should be done, and therefore must be up to something dodgy and claimed I didn't have any automatic right to any particular lecturer's reference 😠despite agreeing on Feb 13 2014 by email that he would 'be happy to write a reference'. And this rude lecturer with an attitude problem was the current BA admissions tutor. Thank goodness I had Susan James as stand-in admissions tutor because at least she made the experience pleasant!🙂👍
By this second referee waiting a few vital weeks to reply to me and then his inappropriate handling 😠of the reference, he generated an unnecessary problem which also later led to attempts to pressure me into complaining twice over: one to my previous uni about my referee's email and behaviour to his head of department; two, to the prospective uni to which I had applied to insist they "correct the error" of not processing my application properly, as one person put it. This even included becoming very hysterical 😵when I refused to act on suggestions that I agree to someone, that they suggest, to run after staff to make them provide a reference. This, of course, included pressuring me into agreeing to someone going after Susan James for her to write a reference. This was totally unacceptable 😡and inappropriate 😡because she felt that since she had never marked my work (nor done the dissertation with me) she was not first in line for writing a reference, there were 4 other lecturers who had occupied that role. (Not that the uni I was applying to cared which lectures did the references, it was just another petty rule of my department that referees should be familiar with your work but since lecturers can't be bothered to mark students' work until the final year none of them know your work that well.) Anyway, Susan James and I had agreed on this earlier so I wasn't going to go back on what we had agreed together and I made this clear to anyone suggesting her as a referee. The fact they took no notice of me and that I'd said no to her being one of my referees and still went after her is regrettable but not my fault!😞
It took me 3 1/2 years to get to the stage that it might have, hopefully, finally stopped! It's a beyond ludicrous situation. There is only one of me and an awful lot of them constantly pressuring me to continue with the MRes application in some way, despite it being closed back in July 2016 or maybe earlier. There was, again, a technical hitch 😱 which meant I couldn't access my profile. (I had an email given to me by this new uni which I never set up so never used!) This left me unable to check the progress of my online application frequently enough on the university's site. 😞 So it was only much later that I saw that the department had made their decision about my application within just 8 days of the faculty receiving it 😮😮which was by the end of May 2016. But the admission status is not filled in at that time (according to my print out of my profile back then). So why was the chair of the department offering to help with contacting my referees (choice of 3 male lecturers, the two who agreed previously in 2014 and my dissertation supervisor) to confirm need for and method of submitting 2 references? That was just a load of mucking me about! 😠 And all this for a 1 year taught 👎🙄🤦 (a backward step since I was already doing independent research for the past 3 years publicly) followed by a 1 year research year.
No experience in the world can prepare anyone, let alone a young person, for this level of unpleasantness.😪 Even my mother remains completely baffled. It's not something she so much as remotely experienced herself and can't believe that so-called educated people can happily behave in such an appalling way with total disregard for the effect they are having on one single young individual. 😪
Neither uni could keep their story straight whether one or more references did or didn't come through.🙄 Frankly, if you are going to create such a circus routine 🙉over processing my postgrad application then the prospective uni is as bad as the one I graduated from so I'm not interested in studying there anyway!
And the lack of proper communication between the chair and myself complicated matters because he didn't keep me informed even though he claimed he would. Also, the technical hitch meant I couldn't keep an eye on how my applicant was going. So, I'm still not sure exactly when they updated my profile. But it did mean I relied on receiving an email to inform me of the result which, ironically, came after I received email confirmation from a lecturer (one of the referees) that he'd submitted his reference. Since we were in the EU at the time it's incredible that there can be such miscommunication between 2 philosophy departments, one in the UK and the other in the EU. They have 2 different systems; different deadlines depending on whether you are a member of the country or not, so being part of the EU didn't count, even down to needing a country specific profile on top of the uni specific one (for goodness sake such bureaucracy when we're all in the same union); and a separate admin person who dealt with foreign students which I found surprising! Surely, UK students were not foreign students as such!
And no I wasn't going to complain to either department, I'd heard that story before! 😱Women are fooled into thinking - have a policy and complaints system and since no individual or institution wants you to complain, that'll empower women and prevent harassment. Right? Well, in my experience, wrong! Institutions actually want complaints and plenty of people who work there assist the institution by constantly behaving badly. So, in the end, you either have to run around complaining all the time😤 and get labelled as someone who is just the type to complain unnecessarily about everything (this causes you stress and wastes your time) or, like me, you realise what the game is and just ignore their preposterous, attention-seeking behaviour. Unfortunately, the problem doesn't just go away. And they keep the pressure up so you have no choice but to act on independent advice to go public about it later in order to stop them harassing you. 😢
There has to be a way of preventing and stopping institutions from endlessly harassing people (both when they are internal and after they've left the institution). If I have this problem and all I'm doing is studying hard📒 ✍ with my head down focusing on the course, 📚carrying tutorials because nobody wants to pull their weight and participate properly by contributing to the academic discussion, then how do others cope? I did go to socials but only the uni philosophy society's or departmental ones which took place on the uni premises. I never lounged around in the pub getting drunk and becoming incoherent nor got saddled with a stitch-up boyfriend. The BA tutor did try to stitch me up with a PhD female student to walk around with me all the time on campus, for my safety, apparently - I was and am an athlete and she wasn't, so who is doing the protecting? And besides, The Handmaid's Tale comes to mind..... Luckily, that was one of my A Level texts so I didn't fall for that daft suggestion.
So the upshot was, I didn't do the MRes and carried on as an Independent Researcher which is a better use of my time and means that I have essentially been in philosophy since October 2009 continuously, whether as a student of philosophy or as a researcher in philosophy.
Here's my statement on it, available on my academia page:
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