“I don’t think so. I said!” I felt my eyes tearing up.
“Let’s wait to see what they say. Let’s not jump to conclusions.” He responded with stoic and reassuring calmness in his voice.
“Do you think I would be a good hairdresser? Or an usa rcs data interior designer? I wanted to be an interior designer when I was young.” As I started planning my next career moves outside of academia they called me back upstairs.
I sat back down in the same room. The air seemed filled with knowledge, but lacking oxygen. Here I was, patiently waiting for the verdict.
“So, there are a few things we think you should work on,” one of my examiners said, as he started to elaborate on the aspects of my work they were not convinced by. Perhaps noticing my worried and disconcerted expression, he continued “but we should be saying congratulations, really…”
“What? Congratulations? Does it mean I passed?” I thought to myself as his voice was becoming increasingly quieter and my thoughts louder. “I passed… I passed. I passed!”
We spent some time discussing the marking system at the University of Edinburgh. These systems are different at every institution, and at Edinburgh, the possible marks vary from ‘A – no further changes to be made to the thesis’ to ‘J – thesis is deficient and cannot be revised to satisfy the degree requirements’ with different possible outcomes in-between.