Mark Goodacre at the NT Blog posted about this topic, and it was a little more substantial than my last post about the issue.
One thing I commented on his blog was that UK students do have the opportunity to get more breadth here in than I expected. First, you are expected (though not required) to sit in on modules, though you don’t do any writing. Secondly, you also are expected to attend your department’s (NT, OT, etc.) weekly seminar that always has a broad range of presenters and topics. Plus you have the option to attend other departments’ seminars as well. While these don’t push you as much as actual course work, you do get something out of them. In addition, most presenters are other scholars from around the country, so you are not just hearing other phd students but (often) well-known scholars present substantive, new ideas.
But it is good to know your program’s potential weaknesses so you can work on them before you get out. Time to publish is also one of those problems with a UK program, so you just start thinking about it early.
Tuesday, 1 January 2008 at 11:10 pm
[...] also my UK vs US Redivivus [...]
Friday, 8 May 2009 at 9:07 am
[...] are my old posts: 1: US vs UK 2: US vs UK, redivivus 3: SBL Forum: US vs UK [...]
Friday, 5 June 2009 at 8:10 am
[...] languages, we talked about the strength of the UK seminar system (briefly, here). [This is in addition to participation in research modules.] These are subject based [...]
Tuesday, 13 December 2011 at 7:43 pm
[...] the two approaches. If you are interested in reading some of these differences you can read here, here, and, here. These are helpful summaries and were considerations that I took into account. But I [...]