Dance your PhD

PhDs or any form of research can be incredibly frustrating. The nature of what you are doing means that things do not work out as planned and often take 10x as long (for no apparent reason). People that have not undertaken a lot of research may not understand this and may presume that it is down to bad planning of the person involved, sometimes it is, but more than often it is not. I can plan for Great Britain. Day plans, week plans, yearly plans - but I cannot plan for experiments spontaneously not working, or fire alarms interrupting experiments or other random events that seem to happen when an experiment is in mid flow (if aliens were to land they would do it in the middle of a very expensive, very important experiment). As you can probably tell I am going through one of these frustrating times - everything I am doing seems to be failing on me or has come to a complete standstill. HOWEVER, I am not going to moan about how rubbish a PhD is... as many people in the Internet forums seem to http://www.postgraduateforum.com/forum.aspx . I have chosen to do this, I do enjoy it ... and I WILL finish this in 3 years.

I have chosen another way to spend my morning ..... DANCE YOUR PhD! A craze from the country where nearly all crazy ideas come from (the US & A) ... Just search on YouTube for 'Dance Your PhD' and I guarantee you will no longer be annoyed or frustrated with your life/PhD, and a whole world of good feeling and laughter will come your way. It is the best idea I have seen in a very long time - no longer will people have to worry about explaining what exactly your PhD is on, or what you are doing with your life, everything can be made clear and simple via the medium of expressive dance and YouTube. As an added bonus you can actually win real money for your efforts. This is like Glee, but waaay geekier. Glee for scientists.....

This is my personal favourite, mostly because it involves some Daft Punk, ass wiggling and stripping:



More info about the 2010 competition can be found here - http://gonzolabs.org/dance/

Maybe the media could take this mainstream and report all science topics via expressive dance? It would probably make things clearer than they are today.

I will keep you posted, I am off to plan my dance :-)

Comments

  1. Great post, I can completely empathise with the frustrations of experiments mysteriously not working...all part and parcel of a PhD. The next time I'm in the same boat (which will more than likely be the next time I'm on the bench) then I'll think of dancing it out instead of losing my mind!
    Rachel

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm looking forward to seeing your PhD dance soon!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to help someone that is writing up their thesis

How many papers should academics publish per year?

Getting Women into Science, EU Directive