Chapter 2 [Academia: Not Just A Fancy Type Of Nut]

It's been over to a year and a half since I last wrote a post that wasn't a place-holder, mainly due to the fact that every time I attempt to stick my head above the parapet and get some creative writing done, I need to refocus on something else more pressing, such as napping on my desk or stealing food from social events from the main atrium outside my office.

It's what I do.

First and foremost, I'd like to review some of the things that have happened to me since January last year as they relate to my academic career and the other things that I've done on the side, just so everything's up to speed:

• Despite having a truly wonderful time as a resident tutor in Sherwood Hall on campus, I resigned my post without renewing my annual contract, as I felt I simply wasn't close enough to the Nottingham riots. [On a related note: the day I signed my contract for my current apartment, news footage could be seen of people throwing firebombs at the police station from my patio area. Some things just come for free.]
• I travelled to Spain to deliver a talk on the content of my first paper, the end result of which was published and won an award for best student-directed research paper of the conference in question. This is in itself surprising, since I don't remember writing most of the paper [I had just rediscovered my local pub], and I also don't remember giving most of the talk [I was attempting to force choke someone in the audience who was audibly playing Angry Birds].
  
• I did a lot more teaching, refined my mark-by-stairs method detailed elsewhere on this page and became a central University co-ordinated invigilator for examinations. All of those games you hear about invigilators playing - such as standing next to the person they think is most likely to fail - are grounded in unassailable truth.

Pictured: the future of British education.

• I decided to re-enter the Executive committee of the computer science society I began when I was an undergraduate, since my girlfriend Nichola recently qualified as a medical doctor and is undertaking her residency in Dumfries & Galloway up in Scotland. Since that meant I had no one to hand to shout aft-ignored jokes at, who better than a couple of dozen malleable idiots undergraduates? Moreover, how better to demonstrate my awareness of modern culture than by rapping my candidacy speech?
  
  
   
• My supervisor - Graham Hutton - was promoted to a professorship recently, lending a certain shine to being one of his students [in much the same way that standing in the background of a news report at an important event makes you famous]. The man has proved an incredible supervisor, weathering me through a six month mental breakdown towards the start of my second year, introducing numerous OCD-like habits into my writing style and generally being a great help with my ever-dwindling work ethic.

I swear to God, Laurence, if you don't learn how to cite
a journal properly in the next two weeks, I'm kicking
you into the fucking sea.

So it would appear that I've survived the first two years of my PhD, meaning that I'm over the halfway mark. More bizarrely, it would appear that due to the temporal nature that is doctoral training, this means that I'm one of the most senior students left in the group. This terrifies me, as I don't feel at all ready to step into the shoes of a `real' academic [in fact, I feel a genuine fraud, but as Graham reliably informs me, this feeling doesn't go away. Ever.]. This is probably for the best, however, as so far as academic role-models go, I'm somewhere between Chairman Mao and Ferris Bueller.

I intend to make this a more regular thing again, since if I'm not concentrating on writing my papers [eight and a half pages, Graham] I might as well be putting words down somewhere else.

Or napping. I've not decided.