Research Wondering how many paper deadlines I can miss before my advisor drops me as a student. I'm supposed to be on grant funding which isn't a great fit for me (meant for new PhD students, which I am not) soon, but it'll have expectations about research productivity that I don't know if I can meet. I'm considering telling my advisor to take me off the grant and going back to teaching instead. I don't know what to do or how to talk about this with people because in my head it just sounds like "yeah I'm too lazy and unproductive where can I get some low expectations" which isn't exactly something I want to be saying to faculty in my department. At least my wife has a job so we aren't immediately in trouble if funding gets tricky. Shop Over a year ago I did a few oxyacetylene welds on my exhaust. They were not very pretty, but here's one: Recently while doing some very-not-instagram-quality welds on a lawnmower blade (long story) and disintegrating mower deck, I realized that part of why my welds are so bad is that 1/16" filler rod is way too big for the tip size I was using. As soon as I'd dip the filler in the puddle, it would freeze and stick the filler to one side or the other. I'm going to pick up some smaller filler soon and give this another try. Yesterday my wife bent a lug wrench removing a flat tire from the truck. I'm impressed. Those nuts were on tight and rusty.
It's not the rod, you need a bigger tip. Oxyacetylene is great because you can pretty much weld with whatever you have around. Baling wire, coat hangers, hardware cloth... we never bothered buying stock for oxy 'cuz you can use literally anything. Same with TiG if you're doing steel. But if you're not getting it hot enough your welds will look like...that.
I mean yeah the thin stuff rips but exhaust tubing ain't that skinny. Boilerplate it ain't but exhaust tubing is bread'n'butter oxy stuff because if you arc weld it you gotta go like two inches a second and that's no fun. You need to keep the puddle from blowing through. Tap the rod into the puddle and it doesn't much matter about anything else; the trick to oxyacetylene welding is that there's enough solid under the liquid to keep it from going poof with the gas pressure. After that it's like soldering; you just feed the puddle. That gets tricky with like gas tanks but you can do it with bodywork no prob (minus the puckering of course). If you have more exhaust shit to do it's not cheating to buy a 45 degree bend and lap-weld it.
Everyone hits that point where they feel like they’ve fallen behind in their degree program. Are these deadlines your advisor has set for you? What are they based off? In my experience, truly inflexible deadlines in academic research are uncommon. Professors will almost always try to go fast though. Best thing for you to do is remain calm and continue to be thorough with your work. Little trouble will come your way if your efforts are solid but progress is slow. Research is just slow.
How important/significant are those deadlines? Sorry if it seems daft, but from what I've seen/been told, research-level maths is exceptionally slow when it comes to stuff like peer review, so it feels to me like a natural question. I'd love to have something constructive to say about your problem, but there's a rather significant gap in experience. Wishing you all the best, though.Wondering how many paper deadlines I can miss before my advisor drops me as a student.