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.
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| 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.]
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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.
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| 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.
