Chapter 0 [Everything On Fire, All The Time]

Wow. Busy doesn't quite capture it.

They say that time is that property of the universe that neatly prevents everything from happening at once - unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working as of late. I'm typing this from the confines of my hall tutor flat on the University Park campus, having moved in about four weeks ago - my PhD 'officially' started at the turn of the month as well, meaning that life is now a constant balancing act of my (broken) time between whiteboards and naked teenagers. It's been an experience.

Where to start? I'll try split this up fairly modularly by talking about my tutorship and studentship seperately, since so far there hasn't been any overlap.

"What do you mean your clothes are in the bin?" - Sherwood Tutorship

What with everything being fairly quiet in Sherwood Hall now that people actually have some work to do - a fact learnt by always managing to, when on the bus to my office, sit next to the girl telling her mother quite loudly down the phone that "like, university is so hard and like, the essays we have are totally, like, pointless" - I'll instead recount Freshers Week (depending on where you're reading this from, this is Rag Week, O Week, Frosh Week, Holy Shit Man I'm So Drunk Week et al, contextualise as you will) and the duties expected of me.

Pictured: everyone

As a new tutor I received a brief run-down of the fire alarm system that works in the hall, and by extension the entire University - shown how to work out where an alarm originated, how to disable the sirens, how to replace broken glass on the alert panels and so on. This was useful, but as it turns out in the first week the ability to read a fire pager falls flat on its face compared to how quickly you can get to a window facing the main quadrangle of the hall.

Before I explain, any readers who have lived on University Park in the past know that Sherwood Hall is a direct neighbour of Rutland Hall, whom have managed to, over the years, delicately cultivate an image of being...well...bastards. They revel in it and ensure that their image is always relevant by setting off fire alarms in as many halls as possible and as frequently as they can in the first week, as directed by the Week One reps and two pints per kilogram of lean muscle mass.

This is relevant because as the hall within spitting distance (we share a turning circle for taxis) it means we get the full brunt of their efforts in bastardry (is this a word? confirm please, English majors!). Being able to get to a window was useful in Freshers simply because odds are that you wouldn't be spotting a toaster with a faulty element, but rather a group of rugby players dressed as ballerinas shouting "WAHEYYYY!" and charging across the quad back towards Rutland Hall (my request to keep a tranquiliser-rifle by the window was, sadly, declined). It's pretty easy to identify someone when they're battling to breathe because their costume is so tight it's shifted their organs.

The hall tutor system revolves around a rotation of being the 'duty tutor', which coincidentally is me this weekend - the general rule of thumb is that we're responsible (in a pastoral and safety sense) 24/7 for 'our' tutees in the blocks nearest to where we live (for example, my tutees are those that live in Blocks H and J) but for one night a week we receive a 'duty tutor phone' which we're expected to answer at any point between 22.30 and 07.30 the next morning and deal with any issues that may arise, extending to fire alarms (we become the fire safety co-ordinator for the night). WAHEYYYY!

On my first duty night, which was the third day of Freshers Week, I decided that I would rather struggle through by staying awake so that I wouldn't be caught with my pants down (or pyjamas on) when I got called out to deal with a fire alarm. And deal with them I did. Two fire alarms went off, one of which involved me chasing a guy over to his block in Rutland and threatening death through a window (I run after no man as a general rule). If I'd been allowed my rifle, nothing would have escalated. Alas!

These two are very related.

Fire alarms apart, the job is a rewarding one - I know a fair few of my tutees quite well now, and whilst one quickly mentally categorises people into trouble-makers and the quieter (inevitably more interesting) ones, it's nice to be able to share stories about what we study and where we've come from. Although...I've noticed a number of horrified faces when I say "PhD in Computer Science". (Am I pronouncing it wrong? I think a lot of people are mishearing it as "I've put a dog turd on your pillow.".) The other tutors  and the Warden are also an amazing bunch, and what with research topics running the gamut from Mechanical Engineering to Viking Studies, it's refreshing seeing how people in other fields approach their PhD.

To give a rough idea of the space in the flat given to me as a perk of the role, this is my living room (I have a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom as well) -

In my defence, I had just moved in. Things are still just as unpacked, though.

One crucial point about Sherwood Hall is that it operates on a much more formal basis than others - the hall system involves 'tutorial dinners' where we invite six or so of our tutees to a black-tie event in the Hall dining room, where there's wine and such. We have one of those a week, rather than a term. I mention this because those of you who have read my other posts will remember that I managed to make a complete arse out of myself in front of Professor David Greenaway, the Vice-Chancellor of the University, at my graduation ceremony. 

Well...it turns out he's coming to one of these tutorial dinners in a fortnight to get a feel for how it all works and what the students think about it. The day that he's coming was originally scheduled to be a Halloween-themed evening [fancy dress optional, mercifully] - sadly I think the prospect of asking Professor Greenaway to put white paint on his face and draw a skull on himself with lipstick was too daunting, and I was devastated to hear that the themed night has been moved to the next week. Some things are worth more than mere money. 

No doubt my next post will involve a story about how I accidentally threw a wine glass at his head. Sorry in advance, Dave.

"So...is this all, like, REAL mathematics?" - PhD Studentship

Of course, none of the above would be possible were it not for my being a PhD student. All things being equal, research provides a very neat dual aspect to my life as a postgraduate which I enjoy (although this may change when things really hit a brick wall) - I like my labmates, I like my supervisor, I like the field I'm working in, and I have a research direction (I'll talk briefly about this later). Of course, if it was just a matter of my going in to the office, sitting down, reading/coding and then going back to Sherwood, this would be a pretty pointless blog. There are other aspects, and those are what I'll be talking about.

Despite not really having any living costs as such (food and utilities are paid for by the tutorship, and rent is halved), I've signed on as a teaching assistant for a compulsory first-year module called G51MCS Mathematics for Computer Scientists. It covers the bare basics of mathematical logic, induction and reasoning in general. I say compulsory, but I didn't take it when I was an undergraduate here as the mathematics side of my degree superceded the requirement that I take MCS as a prerequisite. Coming at it after three years working on things in the same vein, it all seems childishly easy - however one of my tutees in Sherwood is a computer scientist, who tells me that people are in absolute hysterics over it.

Excellent.

As part of this assistant job (which I do with Joey, a labmate) I run tutorial classes on certain Mondays and Tuesdays, and also mark four pieces of coursework for three of the five groups that students who take MCS have been split up into. I should admit that I'm meant to be marking their first coursework right now instead of typing this post, but the School Office managed to screw up the release of the scripts because "it wasn't on the system yet" (is it just me or is "the system" becoming a more and more transient way of saying "we done goofed"?). [If any of you reading this work in the Office, I still love you.]

All the information the University has on you and your academic progress. Safe and sound.

Because we work in a teaching environment by doing this, new PhD students are obliged to attend short courses by the University Professional Development team. The critical one for people who are teaching in Computer Science is called "Demonstrating in Laboratory Practicals", despite what I'm doing this semester not technically being a laboratory, nor there being anything practical involved. This kind of stuff happens so depressingly regularly now that I've stopped even noticing.

Having registered, I received an email saying that a few time slots had been cancelled due to commitments of the course leader, and would we mind very much if we sat in with the Pharmacy PhD students to get the course done? Of course, I agreed, and this Monday just past I went.

As it turned out, what with being a talk designed with pharmacists in mind, the majority of the three hours involved things like safety in laboratories whilst handling chemicals. Now, I know that mathematics can get pretty stressful when things don't work but I'm not entirely sure how useful the skills involving calling a burns unit at the Queen's Med are going to be when I'm writing things on the whiteboard. Of course, if anyone drops a beaker of ß-bromostyrene (it could happen, right?) whilst on my beat, I'll know exactly what to do.

If Terminators produced sperm...

Back to the actual topic of my own research, I had a two hour meeting with my supervisor (hi Graham!) to bash ideas around and came out with a much clearer vision of what I'm going to be looking at for the next couple of months at least. I won't clog up the end of this post with the nitty-gritty details, but I'll make another post relatively soon explaining the general details of my research, which will probably be at a level totally inaccessible to most despite my best efforts. 

And of course, having an idea and a direction leads naturally on to bashing things out on a whiteboard. I love whiteboards, as there's nothing that can humble someone that walks into your room faster than a wall full of totally cryptic scrawling (my supervisor agrees, and admits that he likes keeping things on his board for exactly that reason). Being quite proud of myself, I decided to take a picture, as this will probably be the last time anything I write on a whiteboard makes sense to me.

Pictured: first year Haskell. Have fun, freshers!

There were a fair few other things I wanted to talk about, but they'll probably have a better fit in another post. Which I'll write when I have a better idea about what the hell it means to put 'co-' in front of a word in a mathematical sense.

In summary, then? Enjoying it a lot so far - not much free time to spend with my local bar or girlfriend as of late, but the latter's being a) very understanding and b) busy with her fourth year medicine herself, so everything is golden for now [this has definitely just jinxed my luck]. The pile of papers next to my laptop is looking pretty dejected though - there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day to read everything I want to. Especially not when I've just spent two hours typing this post. Oops!

Thanks for reading.

Table of Contents [PhD Zero]

Had you asked me a fortnight ago how confident I was about the prospect of hitting the ground running with the PhD, I would have answered with a fairly optimistic 'very'. It's not as if I've spent the last two months either gallavanting around America, playing any number of (fairly crap) Xbox games or becoming a familiar face in the local Wetherspoons, right?

Well, for all intents and purposes, I've gotten down to business now - although one could argue that the gloves are still on, since technically I'm neither registered with the university as a student nor on the payroll of the EPSRC yet. Which I guess makes me a fraud. An anonymous, unpaid fraud. Regardless - I have a desk, an office key and an ever-increasing awareness of both of the opprobrium to come and the misplacedness of my initial confidence.

I'll preface by mentioning that I'm using a Mac to write this blog post. And there are issues to address.

Yo dawg, I heard you like recursion so I put a function call in your function call in your function call in your functi-

I have long operated a policy of never purchasing iAnything from Apple - I figured that if they can throw iPods out dime a dozen in magazine competitions it was surely just a manner of time until one fell into my lap. In the four years I've stuck to this dogma, Lady Luck has proved herself a Steve Jobs fangirl and I've received nary a penny for my efforts in apathy. Until recently.

When my place was confirmed, I was told that I had been allocated a thousand pounds to purchase a new machine. My previous (burned out with thermite shortly after hearing this news) laptop was a Tesco Value job, bought amidst furious tears that my desktop PSU gave out a week before a coursework hand-in and seemingly powered by the same. Since everyone else in the Functional Programming Laboratory uses a Mac or a *nix machine, it seemed wise to get one, since I could easily ask for help when needed. Having used the beast for a fortnight now, I can safely say that the last time a machine made this little sense to me, George Michael could still drive in a straight line.

Technoracism aside, I genuinely love my new workplace. Cue the obligatory spat of descriptive photos...

The rest of the room is pretty empty for the time being, as there's a spat of people leaving the University and about as many people joining with me (although none quite so keen, it would seem). Pictures of the office with people actually IN it are going to have to be promised for a later date, I'm afraid. 

High point of the last two weeks? Easy. Dual monitors.

Twice the porn, in half the time!

There's an old adage that paraphrases quite neatly, effectively saying that even if you're the top of your class as an undergraduate, you're still pretty much the most useless researcher in the world. It's true. Whilst it may seem evident to most, you're basically hand-held throughout the entire BSc process - which may explain the panic associated with the individual dissertation. Postgraduate study appears at first glance an entirely different beast - the major stumbling block so far seems to be where to start: academic papers seemingly have a habit of circularly referencing themselves, so much that actually working out the definition of something supposedly simple (angelic non-determinism, anyone?) requires a string of Google/Wiki/IRC requests. I've been advised by at least one person to start by reading books rather than papers...but what when your books look like this? Are there audio books? simple.wikipedia topics? Facebook fan pages? [0 of your friends like this page. Be the first!]

Nonetheless, I have a bevy of papers that I've set myself to task with (mostly related to Haskell, monads and compiler theory, as it's probably wise to start by reading the things I'm meant to be...right?) - of course, by reading, I mean scanning over, realising I understand nothing and giving up before starting drinking by noon. Which might actually be a good idea, since in the last week I've discovered that I know nothing about a fair whack of topics in which I thought I had a good grasp. Surprisingly though (and I add this for the sake of fellow sufferers in second year abstract algebra [!]), I managed to answer someone's question about the definition of an automorphism despite having no idea about it when I actually needed it, proving that you apparently absorb more group theory than you think when you're busy drawing cocks over everyones notes.

In light of this, I almost feel bad for slandering Prof. Hoffmann's good name back in the revision period of '09. Almost.

Whilst I'm on the topic of looking like a cock...in the spirit of actually proving my conviction to giving a toss about what I've signed up for, I started joking around that I was going to get a lambda tattoo on my inner right wrist. As is the nature of oft-repeated ideas, it took hold and I'm actually pretty dead-set now. The question is, at what stage on the scale of 'nerdy lambda calculus tattoo ideas' do I hit and stick? To demonstrate either side of said scale...

 

That is - either one with a humorous quip behind it ("Oh? You want to see my ID?") or the full-on god-damn Y-combinator for full dedication-to-the-cause points? Decisions...

On an entirely different - and closing - note, I'm due to move into my resident tutor flat within the next week. I'd have moved in already, except the flat in question is being entirely refurbished (read: gutted and re-IKEA'ed) - I'd love to admit that I'm as excited as a five-year-old boy on Christmas morning at the prospect, but since the process of moving in indicates the nigh-arrival of three hundred freshers and several fire-alarms, it's more like said boy running down the stairs and remembering that he's Jewish.

This means that I get to change neighborhood from somewhere where this happens... 

Lenton, I'm actually going to miss you.

...to this.

No seriously - I was just trying to cook a pack of noodles with this flamethrower...

I can't wait.

Acknowledgements [BSc Graduation]

As it turned out, the hiatus that has been my summer thus far was rudely interrupted by my BSc graduation on Monday - the Rubicon of my PhD, as it were. Yours truly, never being one to turn down the opportunity to ruin a video or otherwise make light of such things as important ceremonies (as you will come to learn, dear reader) - had no option but to attend.

Since the entire point of this blog is to discuss the steps taken which lead up to a PhD, it seems a fitting departure point to make the opening non-trivial post concern my first graduation - meaning that I'll be able to neatly wrap everything up full-circle in four years. For those of you who have either never graduated from a HE institute before, or have already - but so long ago that the whole experience is no longer any more than a memory - let me run down how it works nowadays.

Firstly, I arrived. This was important, as otherwise everything else would have encountered a minor hitch. In attendance were my ever-suffering parents Noeleen and Edward, and my ever-lovely girlfriend Nichola. The latter, despite not having a ticket, managed to con her way into the event by telling one of the attendants that we're engaged and she was appropriately devastated that she wouldn't be able to witness my special occasion. Bingo.

Shortly after arriving, I realised that whilst I could see everyone around me wearing mortarboards and robes, the only sign I could see directed me towards tea and coffee. Cue sweating (although not nearly as much as I would over the next two hours) and pace-quickening towards the only building that wasn't being held up by pegs in the hopes that some Good Samaritan would direct me to where I needed to be. Stopped briefly to take the obligatory photo that must appear at least twice in everyone's Facebook "Graduation 20**" album.

This is that photo.

To summarise what would otherwise be a pretty crushingly boring description of registering and dressing [although there is something to be said for the fact that Ede & Ravenscroft seem to employ people exclusively under five foot tall to dress graduands], suffice to say that I was eventually seated before enduring a thirty minute wait as the hall became progressively stuffier. Distracting solace was found in a looping video of some gorgeous aerial views of the University campus, which only made me bitterly long for the days back when I was a helicopter and thus able to truly appreciate the rolling (snow | rain | vomit)-covered fields which form the majority.

At some point between seeing the Portland Building for the seventeenth time and my nodding off onto my (remarkably heavy) ribbon colours, the focus of the projector screens shifted from gardenias to graduands - the cameramen panning across the length of the hall to capture those eager faces of people about to move off into the wider world and make a powerful, meaningful contribution to society. And me. I would usually at this point post a picture of the (frankly, genius) faces that I pulled here, but the techies behind the online graduation video repository have deigned to keep that section in. Until the day I die I hope that this was a policy I was responsible for.

Then these two arrived.

Professor David Greenaway and Jeff Randall (of Sky News and Daily Telegraph fame) spoke at great length of how fantastic an alma mater Nottingham is and how its graduates go on to do everything from inventing toilets to scrubbing them (but damnit with pride) - although I suspect that the latters' motivation stemmed from holding a Nottingham DLitt honoris causa and having been inducted into the College of Benefactors moments before speaking. High point of the ceremony: Jeff describing himself as a "miserable turd" (you can honestly check this for yourself) whilst quote-lifting from correspondence sent to him.

Between these two speeches lay the actual meat of the day. I learnt two things here. Firstly, that there are approximately two hundred possible surnames between "Adams" and "Armstrong" as a rough heuristic for anticipating how long a graduation list is, and secondly that I look my very best when standing on a tiny stage, beset by cameras, academics and parents on all sides and with a light that I can best describe as Proxima Centauri shining directly in my face.

And all the while, the chap next to me was reading the University prospectus.

The real tour de force of ballsing-up the entire thing happened - mercifully - after I was (mostly) out of range of the filming camera [although the following is bound to have been recorded on several iPhones]. After shaking David Greenaway's hand and receiving what was either a completely heartfelt "Congratulations Laurence, well done." or one of the best shows of fake emotion I've seen in many a month, I felt it appropriate to reply with nothing more or less than "You're alright.". No Latin witticism, no razor sharp pun. Something that I would have said to my brother in the pub. He noticed.

Feeling suitably embarrassed and flustered in equal measure at this point, I take flight down a set of stairs. The wrong set - but down those stairs I went - catching my robe on part of the stage scaffolding as I descended, leaving me stuck in a pose halfway between The Phantom of the Opera and The Dark Knight (if photos of this exist, kindly do not contact me with them). Shaking myself free with a movement just short of a barrel roll, I quickly moved back to my chair - only for my coursemate, graduating mere seconds behind me, to sit down with a folder with the words Graduation Award stamped on it.

Crap. I've just graduated without a degree.

After the elapse of a suitable amount of time spent waiting sheepishly before going up to collect my own folder (read: until the end of the ceremony), I returned to the desk which I somehow missed, nearly killing several elderly attendees whilst trying to force myself against the direction of movement. However, I eventually emerged, sweating like I had just ran the Central line, and holding the most expensive sheet of paper in my life to date.

I swear I will upload a more visible copy of this, ASAP.

Having survived this ordeal, I took refuge in the Hospitality tent (hilariously questioned by someone - I won't name them - with "why do they need a hospital here? what do they expect will happen?") whereupon I rediscover that drink only ever hauled out at the most pompous affairs despite being drunk by a completely statistically insignificant number of even more pompous people. Pimms and Lemonade. Needless to say, three of them hit my stomach by the time you can list the 'ingredients' listed in that Pimms advert on TV (protip for Diageo: "jug" just isn't one).

Taking some of the obligatory camera-phone photos, I ready myself to leave (a bottle of vintage port is waiting for me at home by this point) before learning something which leaves me reeling.

Remember the ubiquitous scroll that everyone is holding in their graduation photos whilst putting on their least-creepy smile? It's blank - just a prop. At least, it used to be. Having learnt what they use nowadays, I opted out - at least until my PhD graduation. That degree which you hold in the picture which you parade in front of your in-laws, is nought but a plastic tube.

I'm so proud of you, son.

ANYWAY, I then went into town, received several heckles for wearing my gown (you would wear it too if you paid fifty quid for it), got drunk and had a lovely dinner paid for by Nikki. As I go to sleep for the first time with postnominal letters behind my name, I remember thinking to myself "every day should be like this."

Without the Pimms.

Abstract

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Reply from 209.85.227.191: bytes=32 time=32ms TTL=55...

Hello reader(s)! [take heed, for this is literary optimism at its' finest]

Welcome - my name is Laurence and I'll be using this blog over the course of roughly the next four years [until circa 2014, then] to document my experiences as a PhD student in the form of a metathesis. I'll be discussing the, in my opinion, major departures from the undergraduate experience and the general lifestyle impact of "being a doctoral student" in the 21st century. Moreover, I'll be talking about the dynamics (social, professional and otherwise) of various aspects of those quirks unique to academia, viz. conferences, assistant teaching and being awkwardly positioned on the university social ladder somewhere between "postdoctoral researcher" and "that guy who's always first in line at the cafe at lunch".

So who am I, where am I from, why do I want to do this and what is the point of it all? Well, with identity-theft concerns thrown to the wind, I can tell you that I'm a 21 year old who was born in Cambridge and grew up in Johannesburg, and a graduate of the University of Nottingham, the ambivalent holder of a first class Joint Honours bachelors degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. Due to a) a complete apathy of the concept of doing a Masters degree as an interim step to going anywhere "better" and b) very much liking Nottingham as a place to live/drink/work/party, I decided to stay there for my postgraduate study as well.

I duly applied to the Functional Programming Laboratory of the School of Computer Science to study under Dr Graham Hutton, the very same researcher who supervised my undergraduate dissertation. As much as this appears to have been a choice borne from sloth, his research interests are in the same vein, if not artery, as my own. Convenience at its very best!

My dissertation topic has been tentatively set in sandstone as modular compilers, a term easy on the tongue and relatively complicated to explain, as all good research topics should be. However, in a fashion which I'm sure will be tiresomely repetitive by the time the next half-decade is out, I'm dogged by two...minor problems.

1. I've never considered myself great at programming in a 'modular' way. 
2. I know next to nothing about program compilation and compilers in general.

Challenge accepted, then.

I will also be spending (at least) the first year of my PhD as a resident tutor for Sherwood Hall, University Park. This means that not only am I spending my working week within the confines of a university research laboratory, but also that my home is within campus, where I will be surrounded by eager, studious freshers†  all the time, asking them to please stop spraying me in the face with a fire extinguisher, and no, I don't like listening to Children of Bodom at three in the morning, could they please go to bed? This should add an interesting dynamic/criminal conviction to my postgraduate experience, which I feel is worth documenting here for others perhaps contemplating walking the same path.

Why do I want to blog about what it's all like? Because I like writing with a comic twist. Because this will help me to recount all the anecdotes which I'm sure I'll have forgotten by writeup and which I'll so desperately need for solace when I'm at the bitter end. Because - if by putting this online, I convince a single other person that postgraduate study, for all its pitfalls and positives, is for them or not - I'll have helped someone, in some small way, to make a big decision. Maybe, when all is said and done I can convert this all into one of those ubiquitous advice books with a catchy cover promising to answer all related questions, make millions and retire (odds: poor).

Insofar as the timeframe for an update is concerned, I (hopefully) have a desk in the laboratory free for use from the beginning of August. You'll all have to bay in anticipation of then. There'll be pictures, no doubt. Lots.

Hopefully some of you reading this will continue to follow over the coming months - alternately if you think I'm going about this entirely the wrong way or have a suggestion to put forward, please comment!

Enjoy your summers!

† read: drunken, rowdy bastards