@cnread I just stumbled across an interesting conversation between you and @ShootForTheMoon about infinitives with a nominative subject. I may have found a solution to part of it; videlatin.stackexchange.com/questions/12795/…
@cmw I might be biased. If I hear of ten grad students in the humanities, I'm likely to remember only the two that didn't have any funding. But I do get the impression that unfunded students are more common here than in the US or Netherlands.
I have hard time seeing why a professor would take on a student who has no funding. It sounds practically and ethically questionable.
@BenKovitz I don't think cnread has been in this chat for a while. If the autocomplete did not suggest the name when you typed @cn, then the ping never went through.
@Cerberus Very true. I meant it quite specifically. If you wanted to do a PhD with me, then mathematics or differential geometry or inverse problems would not match what I do narrowly enough.
And the bigger problem is that a student is unlikely to be able to suggest good topics before getting one's PhD: The problem should be interesting to the community, not yet solved, but solvable with reasonable effort. Getting all three right is very unlikely for a student's pet project.
I imagine the same phenomenon exists in the humanities but it might be less pronounced.
@JoonasIlmavirta I'm not at all familiar with the PhD process. What is the funding used for? Is it essentially like a salary for the applicant for the duration of the process?
@BenKovitz The behaviour of chat pings is not the best documented thing around... The best way is to reach is probably to leave a comment under a relevant post on the site.
If it's something very important, we can use the moderator superping, but I prefer to be sparing with that, as users have every right not to use chat if they so prefer.
@Adam It varies between fields, countries, institutions, and times, but basically it's exactly that: The funding is for the salary and the position of a grad student is paid. Sometimes the pay is horrible, but here in Finland it's decent.
Then there is other funding for travel and perhaps teaching buyouts (meaning that you have less teaching if you use external instead of internal money) or something else. But those tend to be minor in comparison to salary and associated side costs.
And tuition. I tend to forget it exists, but it very much does in the US.
The PhD programs in Finland and in the US are structured very differently pretty much all the way from admission to graduation. I'm happy to explain it if you want.
@JoonasIlmavirta Interesting! Here in the US, I'd imagine the average person would think of it just like getting a bachelor's degree or a master's degree. They'd expect you'd have to pay for it like anything else.
