Chapter 1 [Terrorism and Teaching]

Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim.

"Be patient and tough, some day this pain will be useful to you." It would appear that the Romans knew about the onset of the PhD long before we did.

God, where to start? How about the bit where I got called a terrorist on a commercial flight? Or the night I spent an hour considering whether to start marking undergraduate work by throwing it up stairs? How about my moment of clarity after I realised people respond to being taught if you draw a penis (or eight) on the whiteboard? It's been a whirlwind couple of months, I've learnt a lot, and I've now found the time to share it. By that I mean, I'm sitting in my bed surrounded by a pile of papers without the power of will to get out and face another day, and this feels like working.

There's a reason they keep doctoral students on the ground floor.

Sherwood Hall aside, my life as postgraduate has three aspects to it. Research, teaching and networking. We'll start with research, and get it out of the way.

"Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research."

I'd like to quickly take the opportunity to mention that Graham Hutton - my supervisor - has a book which is now Cambridge University Press' best-selling computer science text in Europe; effectively making me the protegé of an academic superhero. Well done, Graham!

Graham told me when I first started my doctorate that research is 90% frustration. I'd debate that. From my experience so far, we have the following:

Apparently I had a girlfriend at one point too.

If I was paid pennies for each thing I liked on Facebook, I'd have more money than I get paid by my EPSRC stipend. Whilst I mean this as a joke, it is, unfortunately, probably true. Thankfully, my research is still interesting me [albeit the fact that it's completely impossible to relay to anyone who isn't a computer scientist, and even then a computer scientist with a fairly solid grip on semantics], so I shan't rock the boat. My supervisor and I are in the arduous process of conceiving a paper for a conference (which can be seen as roughly the equivalent of a pissup with more references), a process of which I'll be in a position to better comment upon when it's done. We're not allowed to use Clipart, though.

Hi! It looks like you're trying to get a PhD!

I'm attempting to avoid plunging into talking about the daily grind regarding my work, since the fact that there is work (and lots thereof) to be done as a PhD student is an obvious fact, discussed at length by books with catchy titles such as "How To Survive A PhD", "Getting Your PhD" and "Why, Oh Why Aren't You A Banker Like Your Uncle Suggested, Your Cousin Is Earning £50,000 You Know, What Are You Doing With Your Life That's Even Remotely Comparable?".

This whiteboard represents two months of my life. It details work which is wrong.

Speaking of books, I've found a fantastic resource in Adam Ruben's "Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision To Go To Grad School". I thoroughly recommend reading it if you're considering applying, or even if you're a postgraduate already! Adam has managed to shoehorn his healthy disdain for academia into an award-winning standup comedy act, and pretty much everything he says rings true. [Edit: I'm not getting a cut of his sales, honest.]

There is, unfortunately, no glamour in kicking printers which have run out of toner, shouting at laptop chargers which refuse to work and filing papers according to a complex system which you forget after a week (ie. Erdos number of primary author multiplied by the number of times referenced) but makes perfect sense at the time. As such, suffice to say that work is happening, and we'll talk about it at some other time.

I love being able to tell undergraduates to "come to my office", though.

"Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

The part of being a postgraduate most visible to those outside your department is the punishm...opportunity afforded to you of being a teaching assistant for various modules. I got on board this gravy train by running tutorial classes and marking the coursework for about seventy freshers in a module called Mathematics for Computer Scientists, although the usage of the word Mathematics in such a context is debatable. Tutorial classes are a complex mixture of running through coursework solutions, advising on things to focus on revision-wise and talking as loudly as possible directly at the person with the most visible hangover.

I'll freely admit that I hated getting up for a Monday 9am tutorial for which a dozen or so people would show up for (only to then play Angry Birds for an hour), the emails asking for exam solutions despite firm emails saying otherwise, the gormless undergraduates leaning around my door and saying "I've been to no lectures, can you help me get a First?" - I saw it all. All of this and more, however, was made up for by my new-found absolute favourite activity as a doctoral student.

Marking.

This man will go on to be an investment banker.

Oh yes. When you're a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed undergraduate, every time a piece of your coursework gets slated, it's the fault of whoever marked it - they didn't understand what you were trying to say, or they were obviously marking everyone harshly, or they're foreign and can't read English properly (I've actually heard this). I'm not innocent in this regard, I did it too. What I've found though, is that the second you stop being an undergraduate, you work out precisely what it is that makes undergraduates so annoying. Sarcasm in work is one of these. And I love it.

When I was a fresher we used to make jokes that the teaching assistants in our programming modules were elves, and we classified them into dark or light elves depending on how rough a time they gave us when marking coursework. We'd avoid dark elves like the plague, to the point where we'd leave the laboratory for a while if there was a risk that we'd end up having our work scoured by them. Fast-forward a few years, and it turns out I'm the darkest elf of them all.

This, of course, makes me a part of the problem. I'm entirely alright with this.

This semester, I'm both moderating web forums and doing laboratory demonstrations for the two modules Functional Programming and Advanced Functional Programming (both convened by my supervisor) and marking some coursework for Machines and their Languages. Speaking of marking...

Back when I was marking work for MCS, I would frequently grab the (massive) stack of papers and retire to the Senior Common Room of Sherwood, accompanied by a bottle of Scotch, which would - more often than not - be finished before the marking was.

I drink to take the logical fallacies away.

One particular night when no one was getting anywhere near a decent mark (resulting, of course, in a lot of feedback being written, lengthening the damned process) I recalled once being told about 'Mark By Stairs'. It goes like this.

1. Stand in front of a flight of stairs.
2. Assign to each stair a percentage, in ascending order, so the bottom stair is 100%.
3. Throw your pile of coursework up abovementioned stairs.
4. Mark accordingly, possibly repeating steps 1-3 to average marks out.

Now, whilst I was desperate to give this method a go, there aren't any stairs in Sherwood which haven't been vomited on by freshers on the lash, and I'm yet to work out a way to excuse the presence of VK Blue on everyones scripts. Has anyone actually tried this before? I'm keen to know.

So it looks like I'm getting a glorious headstart towards being in a position where I can influence the hearts, minds and grade boundaries of various University students throughout my time here. It's more enjoyable than I make it out to be.

Onwards, then, to networking and conferences.

"Welcome to the conference. Here's your pint of whiskey."

If there is one thing I'm truly grateful for over the course of the last year or so, it's the amount of travelling that I've been able to do. Locally, I've been to London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leicester and Glasgow so far, there's a trip to either Madrid or Tokyo on the cards depending on which conference we opt to write my first paper for, and hopefully a jaunt to Germany for the Marktoberdorf summer school. That's just for my first year.

Academia, fuck yeah!

Back when I was in my third year, I was asked by Graham if I'd like to go along to the Midlands Graduate School, a week long series of lectures on various topics relating to theoretical computer science that rotates annually between Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield and Leicester. 

The one I went to was in Sheffield (a city which I'm going to rise above making a joke about, since it's too easy), and was absolutely grand. Meeting fellow truth-seekers! Having poignant discussions about what things mean and the future of our field! Peeling them off the pavement when they've been thrown out of clubs for hitting on the bartenders girlfriend! I met a host of excellent people there, whom I hope to meet again. Soon. Because it's Nottingham's turn to host the MGS in April. Since the last one ended in trying to frantically find someone who'd passed out in a corridor after being snowed on for a good half an hour [hi, Colm!], things can only get better.

My travel nadir has to have been my trip to Glasgow, mind. Having gone there for the Scottish Programming Languages Seminar which coincided with Fun in the Afternoon, a bunch of us ended up sitting together on a bmibaby flight back to the East Midlands from Glasgow International, an airport famed for containing people with no qualms about kicking burning terrorists in their genitals so hard that they injure themselves.

This actually happened.

One might imagine, then, that a fair sense of decorum would be maintained. Unfortunately, I reckoned without Florent. I'm going to simply introduce Florent at this point by saying that he deserves (and will get) a LONG blog post about his antics at some point. 

To cut a long story short, Florent decided it would be wise to tap an air hostess on the shoulder, point at me - at this point completely oblivious, reading a book on category theory - and helpfully inform her that I'm a terrorist. The end result was exactly what you'd expect.

BUT I'M A DOCTOR!

So life as a doctoral student is proving entertaining, maddening and enlightening, all in equal measure. There's more to tell, of course, but to tell it all would turn this into Atlas Shrugged. I'll finish up by taking some time to talk about life in Sherwood Hall, since being a tutor is worth talking about in itself.

"Seriously, you're...my best mate. I love you, man."

I'm by this point more used to seeing some of my tutees when they're drunk more often than when they're sober. I have 33 in total (out of the 261 in the hall) and I'm happy to say that for the most part we all get on quite well. I, of course, have learnt to hate the hours of around 7-10.30pm on club nights [Edit: disregard this, every night is a club night], but that's no different to when I was in halls the first time as a fresher, so it's not really a big deal.

The tutor team (consisting of my Warden, myself and five others) meet for dinner every Monday and Thursday, which involves me talking too much and drinking most of the wine provided. We get on really well as a team, and mercifully haven't had to deal with (m)any massive crises over the course of the first term. It's very easy to find yourself living in a bubble, mind - sometimes I don't leave campus for a week and a half at a time, since all my food is provided for at Sherwood and the only place I need to go is the office. 

The bubble occasionally involves used tampons, but it's still a bubble.

There are other things that happen here which are worthwhile; most notably I've started going to meetings of the Philoenic Society, a group of wine-tasting fundies who think nothing of spending £300 a pop on wine (oh to have that kind of money...). If ever there's a place to meet wonderfully eccentric people, it's at a gathering of ex-Wardens and emeritus professors. I've also been informed instructed by the girlfriend that I'm going to start attending free Tango lessons with her starting in a fortnight or something. I'm hoping she's referring to the soft drink.

So that's all for now; I must apologise for the lack of activity but it turns out that sitting down and trying to write in a way that's at all 'creative' is somewhat difficult when the vast majority of your time involves shouting at a compiler to get it to please, please do what you want, just this once.

In closing, I'd like to quickly comment on the geographical spread of people who have visited my blog and in some cases even sent me emails! It would appear that I have fans in Moldova (is this even a real country?), China, Honduras, Saudi Arabia and the Phillipines, as well as where you'd expect - Mordor, etc. This is a shock - a pleasant one - thank you! I'd also like to express my disappointment that the person who was redirected here after a Google for "nerd tattoo ideas" probably didn't get what he was after. Sorry, buddy!

Keep it together, everyone.