Fake PhD?

I am totally f-ing overwhelmed. There’s a load of reasons why I decided to move to Mongolia and work and one of them is that I don’t want to go to university to study honours/masters/PhD because I’d rather get the equivalent work experience.

So today at work after my note etc yesterday, this guy whose name I don’t know (they get tricky after you remember Dasha, Hasha, Ganzo, Dima and Diwa) sat down with me to tell me I haven’t done enough work. Of course I haven’t. I haven’t done a thing in three months. He tried to explain the structure of an essay/scientific report (uh, yeah, I’ve written a couple). I tried to get out of him what he wanted IN the report. I still don’t get it.

I kind of shut off when he said that he studied to be a doctor in Austria and that I should be a doctor just like him (meaning he wants me to write a PhD like he did, on Mongolian agriculture, based on the work plan they’ve written that is so f-ing overwhelming he told me ‘not to have a tight face’. Of course I’m going to have a tight face. Dang it, I don’t want to write a PhD in nine months. I don’t want to do this. When I study it’s an all encompassing period of my life and I am not healthy –mentally or socially. It’s certainly not something I want to do here. I don’t want to have to motivate myself to study something I don’t want to. I don’t write to write a bibliography. I don’t want to push myself to the limit again just because they want to have an Australian perspective on stuff they already know. I know it’s not going to help them directly. He said in the very words that I am there to say things because no one will listen to him, but if I say something, people might listen. So yeah, that’s great – I can help BUT TELL ME WHAT yOU WANT ME TO DO. He wants me to have free thinking time and come up with my own questions to ask project managers when I don’t get to talk to them because I don’t speak Mongolian. It has the ability to sound all romantic – studying while volunteering in an exotic country, in hope of leaving a lasting legacy in agriculture. IT WON’T WORK LIKE THAT.

So they started fixing our office. It’s a brand new building that we moved in to 4 months ago, just before I got here. The roof has cracks/stains/dodgy plaster at all the joins of the fibro stuff. It obviously means there’s some water getting in there somewhere – doesn’t take someone with a PhD in construction to figure that out. But instead of fixing things at the source, these painter girls have come in to the office, scraped off the falling down bits of fibro and are plugging the holes and repainting. I came home in hope of calming down and being inspired by the prospect of writing a PhD in nine months.