Thursday, February 26, 2009

Some details have come out about a 37-year-old Korean student at Oxford University who committed suicide last July, hours after learning his doctorate in Buddhism wouldn't be granted because his thesis wasn't good enough.

3 comments:

Darth Babaganoosh said...

Well, unlike Korea, people in Western unis don't have their MAs and Ph.Ds rubber stamped after their thesis "defense". I don't doubt there are other Koreans who did the same thing upon having their theses/dissertations rejected.

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Probably, he would only have needed to rework the thesis to make it acceptable. When I was at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a Korean man there was told that his M.A. thesis was too weak and would be failed unless he reworked it. I edited it for him, showing him what was extraneous and what needed to be emphasized. When he'd reworked it, he received a very high evaluation, for he actually had some very good ideas that had been obscured by the extraneous.

Jeffery Hodges

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Brian said...

I just have to know where his faculty advisor was in all this. I understand they're busy and can't babysit a guy's thesis, but if after five years Park wasn't where he needed to be, you have to ask what the advisor was doing.