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holytriplem23 karma

Jesus, I'm really sorry to hear that, I had a shitty supervisor that I fell out with as well so I totally feel for you. Are you worried about what would happen if your former supervisor saw your post, given that you're not anonymous?

holytriplem8 karma

In all honesty, the viva is definitely not the hardest part of the PhD, once you do your viva your examiners have already basically decided whether or not they're going to pass you and what corrections they recommend based on your thesis. As long as you know your thesis well enough and you can be honest about its flaws you're fine. Having said that, my examiners gave me a particularly easy time in my viva so maybe that's not the experience everyone has.

holytriplem6 karma

Non-American here, I've always been confused about the concept of Chuck E Cheese. So basically, you go there to play arcade games and they just happen to serve pizza on the side? I mean that business model might have worked in the 80s but arcade games aren't really big business anymore?

holytriplem3 karma

In answer to your first question, first of all if you can, make sure you have more than one supervisor, or failing that, try to do a project where you're working in some sort of consortium or even just closely with other members of the department so that if things do go south with your current supervisor, there are other people who know you and who can vouch for your work, and so it'll be easier for you to change your supervisor if you need to.

Regarding your second question, obviously make sure it's in a topic you know you'll be really interested in to a point that even studying it for 3-4 years won't make you question your entire existence, also if your project is reliant on data from a future instrument (eg JWST) make sure there's a back up plan in case you don't get that data for whatever reason (eg if the launch of JWST is delayed again).