Why do you hate me

Ok. I admit I don't have a "real" job. But there is still "work" that we have to do.

The majority of a PhD student's time is spent on research. At QUT, one of the regulations state that we are supposed to spend 40 hours a week on our research. That's an 8 hour day for 5 days. Aside from research, we do research-related activities. These include writing submissions for conferences and can occur several times a year, depending on how many conferences you submit papers to. Also included is writing the odd paper for submission to journals for publications, which is important for justifying a grant application, a scholarship or even a job. Writing papers for journal publications is a lot harder because the process overall takes longer and the acceptance rate for some journals is much lower compared to many conferences. These are "research related" because the papers that we write and submit are based on our actual research and not somebody else's. The value that we get from doing this, is getting feedback from others in the area.

The next proportion of our time is spent on community service. This includes being a volunteer at a conference, being on the organising committee of a research related event such as a colloquium, or being a member of a research group. Not many PhD students do this because this is not compulsory and it takes up valuable time. The value that we get from this, is experience and the opportunity to meet people in an organisation who could help your career along the way. Case in point: I was on the organising committee of the research students' colloquium of 2006. The Director of Research for the faculty was also on the committee and it was through this that she knew who I was. This connection became quite instrumental in my application and subsequent acceptance and offer of a scholarship in January this year.

Lastly, the rest of our time is spent making money. Scholarship money is enough for rent, bills and food. It is not enough to supplement a shopping habit, a drinking habit, or a habit for socialising with people. God forbid. So in order to make our bank balances look more presentable, we work. We either do research assistant (RA) work or we teach. RA work can sometimes be related in your area of research, which is great. But it can also be as unrelated and as mundane as doing data entry for 2 weeks. The most consistent form of supplementing our income, is through teaching.

Teaching is what I despise the most. I used to like teaching, but I had a horrific semester which was March - June 2007 and I've still got battle scars. For some reason, the cohort of students last semester were so high-achieving and so motivated, that they were also so problematic in terms of their dissatisfaction with their marks. It is very disheartening to get students who are so unsatisfied with your teaching, in spite of the amount of effort and care that you put into their learning. What upsets me most, is that I know there are terrible tutors out there. I had one in a post-grad subject who used the tute hour for consult. He didn't teach us anything, nor did he even reinforce what was being told to us in the lecture. He was the most slacker tutor I'd ever met in my life. Knowing that such people exist, I would like to think that I am very good at what I do. I make every effort to be prepared and to manage expectations. But you can never please everybody and despite all my efforts, there were still disgruntled students.

It got to a point where I began to have some serious self-doubt and had to ask my supervisor if the problem was me. Was the quality of my teaching reduced? She said it wasn't me and it was just the students who had high standards and high expectations of themselves. How do you tell such students that their assignments weren't good enough without them hating you?

It's difficult because it's such a small part of what I do, yet is something that as an academic, you can never get away from. And it's sad that no matter how good you are, there will always be those who aren't satisfied with you. It's sad that they don't see that I don't get paid to mark and I don't get paid to answer all their emails. They don't see that it takes 3 days to mark assignments and write comments in ALL of them, even though the comments may be scant. They don't see that at the end of the semester, half of these assignments are still under my desk and are testament to probably a whole day of marking which I could've saved. Teaching is the most frustrating, most upsetting, and most thankless job that I do.

Sometimes, I wonder if students can tell a good tutor from a poor one. Maybe they don't care.