Description
Book SynopsisYou Must be Very Intelligent is the author’s account of studying for a PhD in a modern, successful university. Part-memoir and part-exposé, this book is highly entertaining and unusually revealing about the dubious morality and desperate behaviour which underpins competition in twenty-first century academia.
This witty, warts-and-all account of Bodewits´ years as a PhD student in the august University of Edinburgh is full of success and failure, passion and pathos, insight, farce and warm-hearted disillusionment. She describes a world of collaboration and backstabbing; nefarious financing and wasted genius; cosmopolitan dreamers and discoveries that might just change the world… Is this a smart people’s world or a drip can of weird species? Modern academia is certainly darker and stranger than one might suspect…
This book will put a wry, knowing smile on the faces of former researchers. And it is a cautionary parable for innocents who still believe that lofty academia is erected upon moral high ground…
Trade Review“A new novel about academic life is not a ringing endorsement, to say the least. But it will make you laugh. And that’s the point.” (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, February, 2018)
“The story is immersive, and I felt like I was there with our hero every step of the way.” (Chemistry World, chemistryworld.com, January 2018)
“Karin Bodewits’ partly autobiographic book ‘You must be very intelligent – The PhD Delusion’ is a revealing, tongue in cheek tale about PhD life.” (Ulrike Träger, Metior Magazine, November, 2017)
“PhD novel is ‘wake-up call’ on supervisor-student ‘power plays’” (Times Higher Education, November, 2017)
Table of ContentsDedication.- Foreword.- Prologue.- Part I: Before.- Part II: Year 1.- Part III: Year 2.- Epilogue.
