I'm sorry; I feel I should have been able to tell you this. But since my research proposals were to continue the same project it amounted to the same thing to me.
Don't worry, not your fault. I should have run it past my supervisor (unfortunately, he was away from email over the period concerned).
It would have to happen on the day when I need to pack to go South, the day before I spend all day on a bus, and the day after the drunken department Christmas party, when I'd pencilled in the Christmas shopping, wouldn't it?
It's just occurred to me that I have in fact already written a four-page summary of my work, for my (1st|2nd|3rd) year review (and extremely close readers might be able to spot some difference between those three documents). At least some of that ought to be usable...
Well, the "instructions to candidates" bit did say something about explaining how your project fit in with the strengths of the department. But I was already up against the page limit by the time I noticed that, so I just put "Department X has a world-class category theory group, and Potential Supervisor Y is an expert in the applications of category theory to computer science". Both of which are true, but it seems they wanted that bit to take up the bulk of the document :-(
Oh dear! I'd have interpreted the term "research proposal" in the same way, myself. But then academia seems to be rather topsy-turvy. Only last week I was mildly chastened by one of my supervisors for planning my project in too much detail!
Well, this wasn't actually a rejection letter per se - more a preliminary sweep by the maths department before my application was passed on to the formal selection committee. Thus, very generous and much-appreciated: I just wish they could have given me a little more time :-)
In other news, hearken ye programmers unto Steve Yegge's latest drunken blog rant.
Interesting. I'm a sysadmin, so my 'code' tends to be never more than a few hundred lines of PERL or shell but ... complexity is a killer no matter what you do.
Ah, I feel like such a n00b -- my largest project weighs in at less than 2k LOC :-) I read something somewhere in the vasty Interweb that pointed out that problems can be hard either because they are, inherently, tough to solve; or they can be hard because of all the cruft you need to bolt together -- and that all that cruft is rather unnecessary now if you're not desperately concerned with processor cycles or kilobytes of memory...
Perhaps Yegge should be talking to Linus about managing an immense codebase ;-)
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I'm sorry; I feel I should have been able to tell you this. But since my research proposals were to continue the same project it amounted to the same thing to me.
Good luck with the rapid re-write!
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It would have to happen on the day when I need to pack to go South, the day before I spend all day on a bus, and the day after the drunken department Christmas party, when I'd pencilled in the Christmas shopping, wouldn't it?
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In other news, hearken ye programmers unto Steve Yegge's latest drunken blog rant.
Interesting. I'm a sysadmin, so my 'code' tends to be never more than a few hundred lines of PERL or shell but ... complexity is a killer no matter what you do.
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Perhaps Yegge should be talking to Linus about managing an immense codebase ;-)
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