Please help me save my PhD
Donation protected
THANK YOU to everyone!! I have passed the third and final aspect of the University appeal process. Now, i will need to stay enroled until two new examiners have read the thesis. I also must keep paying full part-time fees. The money donated by wonderful and generous folks have kept me going, and now i need to keep going a little longer. Next year's fees of £1950 or so will be due Feb 2015, and if the new examiners are not done by then, i will owe this amount.
If 3000 folks each contribute £1 or $1, I can sort this mess out. Please consider forwarding my campaign to family and friends, and posting it. My story is below.
My background
I have a touch of MS, which developed from Lyme disease, plus I've had a spinal fusion. My Air Force dad, who flew for 72 years, called these my ‘limiting factors’. Such things might LIMIT some of what you do, but can be worked around.
In 2005 I was working in Miami, helping to excavate and examine prehistoric Native American remains that had to be removed from a commercial building development. I worked flexible hours in the lab. At one point I was haughtily informed that my observations didn’t matter: *I* didn’t have a PhD. I do have a Master’s Degree from Yale, but that wasn’t good enough. So, since my then-partner (now husband) was back in the UK after his work dried up in 2002, I had a UK connection. UK PhDs are designed to be earned in three years. They don’t require regular class attendance. I could work at my own pace!
Well, the first University was not a good fit for a wide range of reasons. After 3+ years I left and then occupied myself with presenting papers at conferences, running poetry performance workshops and, as you can see in the photo, analysing the remains from the 16th century English warship Mary Rose. I also presented the results to students, museum visitors and Mary Rose museum staff. I love giving talks to regular every day folks and sharing my love of history, archaeology and the sometimes misunderstood process of studying ancient human skeletal remains.
Fifteen years ago, I was also teaching science two mornings a week at a small primary school in Fairfield (CT USA), to a combined class of 3rd and 4th graders. We made a lot of volcanoes! I did this for almost two years but stopped to concentrate on Yale and Emily who, at 10 was navigating her own path through mild autism and needed a specialist school. But, I returned to teaching when enrolled in University in the UK, lecturing on History of Archaeological Theory; Native American history, or art; osteology; and I LOVE IT. Aside from performing poetry to a massive crowd, there is no bigger thrill, no greater moment of pure joy for me than when leading a class.
In Autumn 2011, two things happened: I decided to try and complete my PhD project at another UK university, and my dad died one week short of 93. As the song goes, “Everybody dies / but not everybody lives”. I realised my dad had indeed lived a great and long life, and I needed my credentials in order to get work doing what I love to do: research and teach.
Winchester University
I returned to university in January 2012, and tested my project out on 37 volunteers: I have created a deskilled system for novices to assess the 50,000 unstudied (or understudied) remains in collections just in England alone, with more excavated every year. Many more are sitting in boxes in other countries, and museums rarely have the funding and expertise to give them a full analysis. My system permits volunteers and museum staff to collect basic information that can enable visiting researchers to ‘pull the right boxes’; collections are often so unstudied that the condition of the skeleton is unknown such as, whether it is in fragments.
I then wrote up the results, analysed them, and came to conclusions. I handed in my thesis in 2013, and had what is called a Viva Voce examination in December 2013. I was given ‘corrections’: changes the two examiners wanted me to do. One examiner is a lecturer at my University, but not someone I work with (the Internal Examiner) and the other comes from a distant University and is supposed to be neither colleague nor friend: the External Examiner. The word count was too high, and the introductory chapters needed to be rearranged. I did these corrections and resubmitted my revised thesis in mid-May 2014.
And then I heard nothing.
As it transpired, the Internal decided I had indeed done enough work to improve the thesis and he emailed the Department of Archaeology on 9 July 2014, stating he felt the thesis should now pass as a PhD. But the External stayed silent. In notes between the two over Summer 2014, she repeatedly asks why I have not addressed a certain issue: but she never asked for this in December 2013!
If she had, I would have restored the work, already written, that had covered this exact same issue, removed in August 2013 at the advice of others. If she had requested these items in a timely manner I could have fulfilled her request.
Instead she failed me, with no way to amend and resubmit the thesis, and she convinced the Internal to change his Yes to a No. She failed me for not submitting work that I was not asked to submit.
The Dilemma
I appealed the failure, and the University turned down my earlier appeals, but then agreed with me at last. I prevailed in my appeal!! But now i will not have finished the degree last summer, when my Internal examiner did indeed pass me; and therefore i did not receive a pro-rated refund of, let's say, 5 months of fees (Sept 2014-January 2015). Not only will i not receive this, i will never see it, as i am now needing two new examiners and they will need to read the thesis. I will need a new Viva. This will all take months. It all comes down to money…..
We have exhausted our savings and have maxed out the credit cards. I have pursued this degree so that I can contribute to our income. When I rewrote my thesis it became a stronger thesis, and i am fairly confident I will pass, but the new examiners will be folks with all new needs and desires and may want new corrections. This can easily stretch into a new academic year, which for me begins every February.
I LOVE giving public talks about archaeology and skeletons and I LOVE teaching. Please help me go forward in my life. A Master’s degree is now rarely considered adequate for lecturing, and there are no research funding opportunities for non-doctorates. I would happily give back to the world, by continuing to hold our free monthly poetry and prose open mic (now in its ninth year!) and by presenting talks at historical societies, archaeology fairs, schools and so on. If you agree that I am worthy of this help, may I ask you to consider helping me out?
Thank you
Rose Drew
If 3000 folks each contribute £1 or $1, I can sort this mess out. Please consider forwarding my campaign to family and friends, and posting it. My story is below.
My background
I have a touch of MS, which developed from Lyme disease, plus I've had a spinal fusion. My Air Force dad, who flew for 72 years, called these my ‘limiting factors’. Such things might LIMIT some of what you do, but can be worked around.
In 2005 I was working in Miami, helping to excavate and examine prehistoric Native American remains that had to be removed from a commercial building development. I worked flexible hours in the lab. At one point I was haughtily informed that my observations didn’t matter: *I* didn’t have a PhD. I do have a Master’s Degree from Yale, but that wasn’t good enough. So, since my then-partner (now husband) was back in the UK after his work dried up in 2002, I had a UK connection. UK PhDs are designed to be earned in three years. They don’t require regular class attendance. I could work at my own pace!
Well, the first University was not a good fit for a wide range of reasons. After 3+ years I left and then occupied myself with presenting papers at conferences, running poetry performance workshops and, as you can see in the photo, analysing the remains from the 16th century English warship Mary Rose. I also presented the results to students, museum visitors and Mary Rose museum staff. I love giving talks to regular every day folks and sharing my love of history, archaeology and the sometimes misunderstood process of studying ancient human skeletal remains.
Fifteen years ago, I was also teaching science two mornings a week at a small primary school in Fairfield (CT USA), to a combined class of 3rd and 4th graders. We made a lot of volcanoes! I did this for almost two years but stopped to concentrate on Yale and Emily who, at 10 was navigating her own path through mild autism and needed a specialist school. But, I returned to teaching when enrolled in University in the UK, lecturing on History of Archaeological Theory; Native American history, or art; osteology; and I LOVE IT. Aside from performing poetry to a massive crowd, there is no bigger thrill, no greater moment of pure joy for me than when leading a class.
In Autumn 2011, two things happened: I decided to try and complete my PhD project at another UK university, and my dad died one week short of 93. As the song goes, “Everybody dies / but not everybody lives”. I realised my dad had indeed lived a great and long life, and I needed my credentials in order to get work doing what I love to do: research and teach.
Winchester University
I returned to university in January 2012, and tested my project out on 37 volunteers: I have created a deskilled system for novices to assess the 50,000 unstudied (or understudied) remains in collections just in England alone, with more excavated every year. Many more are sitting in boxes in other countries, and museums rarely have the funding and expertise to give them a full analysis. My system permits volunteers and museum staff to collect basic information that can enable visiting researchers to ‘pull the right boxes’; collections are often so unstudied that the condition of the skeleton is unknown such as, whether it is in fragments.
I then wrote up the results, analysed them, and came to conclusions. I handed in my thesis in 2013, and had what is called a Viva Voce examination in December 2013. I was given ‘corrections’: changes the two examiners wanted me to do. One examiner is a lecturer at my University, but not someone I work with (the Internal Examiner) and the other comes from a distant University and is supposed to be neither colleague nor friend: the External Examiner. The word count was too high, and the introductory chapters needed to be rearranged. I did these corrections and resubmitted my revised thesis in mid-May 2014.
And then I heard nothing.
As it transpired, the Internal decided I had indeed done enough work to improve the thesis and he emailed the Department of Archaeology on 9 July 2014, stating he felt the thesis should now pass as a PhD. But the External stayed silent. In notes between the two over Summer 2014, she repeatedly asks why I have not addressed a certain issue: but she never asked for this in December 2013!
If she had, I would have restored the work, already written, that had covered this exact same issue, removed in August 2013 at the advice of others. If she had requested these items in a timely manner I could have fulfilled her request.
Instead she failed me, with no way to amend and resubmit the thesis, and she convinced the Internal to change his Yes to a No. She failed me for not submitting work that I was not asked to submit.
The Dilemma
I appealed the failure, and the University turned down my earlier appeals, but then agreed with me at last. I prevailed in my appeal!! But now i will not have finished the degree last summer, when my Internal examiner did indeed pass me; and therefore i did not receive a pro-rated refund of, let's say, 5 months of fees (Sept 2014-January 2015). Not only will i not receive this, i will never see it, as i am now needing two new examiners and they will need to read the thesis. I will need a new Viva. This will all take months. It all comes down to money…..
We have exhausted our savings and have maxed out the credit cards. I have pursued this degree so that I can contribute to our income. When I rewrote my thesis it became a stronger thesis, and i am fairly confident I will pass, but the new examiners will be folks with all new needs and desires and may want new corrections. This can easily stretch into a new academic year, which for me begins every February.
I LOVE giving public talks about archaeology and skeletons and I LOVE teaching. Please help me go forward in my life. A Master’s degree is now rarely considered adequate for lecturing, and there are no research funding opportunities for non-doctorates. I would happily give back to the world, by continuing to hold our free monthly poetry and prose open mic (now in its ninth year!) and by presenting talks at historical societies, archaeology fairs, schools and so on. If you agree that I am worthy of this help, may I ask you to consider helping me out?
Thank you
Rose Drew
Organizer
Rose Drew
Organizer
