Esk

For those of you who haven’t spotted it on various social networks already: I passed! Minor corrections, 12 weeks, hand it back in and I’m a doctor. Ohhhhh yeeeeaaaah.

Now when anyone asks “Is there a doctor in the house?” we can say “Two, actually!” and hilariously delay the arrival of medical attention.

Apparently, it is possible to be recognised for one’s contribution to creating arguments on the internet:

Quora Top Writers 2012 (requires login via email)

493 people were named, including me!

From the description:
Quora’s Top Writers are a group of remarkable people with a talent for communicating with expertise, knowledge, authenticity, and empathy. Some people in the group are experts in specific fields, while others are simply great writers with a talent for describing the human condition and the world around us. Some are professional writers; most are not. All have contributed immensely to Quora and the Quora community.

I get a little icon next to my name for the year and a free T-shirt. Shut up, it’s exciting!

The escape is imminent. I am leaving Aberystwyth (with Jim soon to join me) for Gloucestershire. I am greatly looking forward to several things:

• Access to proper shopping
• More live music
• More comedy
• Multiscreen cinemas!
• Having disposable income
• Being nearer to some of my closest friends

There are, of course, things that I’ll miss:

• The sea and prom
• The view from Consti
• Friends, neighbours and colleagues here - I often complain that nearly everyone has left but when I actually think about it there are several people here from whom I will be sad to be so distant (you know who you are, I hope)
• The friendly small town feel - could you ever walk down the hill without spotting someone you know?
• The energy the students bring
• Our lovely bungalow with its big garden

I’m more excited than nervous and a lot more happy than sad, but I wrote this rather sentimental song post-thesis: (it’s in 6/8 if that helps any musicians out there, otherwise watch this space and I might record it)

The freshers are here
Their futures are bright
They’re gonna take over the town every night
It’s starting to feel like nostalgia
even though I haven’t left yet

As they’re moving into their halls and their flats
creating a uni persona
I’m dotting the ‘t’s and I’m crossing the ‘i’s
On the last assignment I’ll get

Well I was here eleven years
Some might say eight years too long
And this town will be just another memory
No more the place I belong

Well I was here eleven years
I’ll still kick the bar when I go
‘Cause who is to say I won’t come back some day
And once again call Aber my home.

We’re packing the van on the 2nd of November. Help at either end appreciated if you live close by. I will send out our address to as many as I can think of but do just text if I haven’t got it to you!

Other general updates: handed in thesis, went to conference in Bristol, had holiday on Alderney, got a job, found a house, went to Gregynog. Yeah, I could have written a post on each of those. I didn’t, so you’ll have to just call/text/visit me if you are interested

If a thesis is 100′000 words,
And I have 5 months left,
How many words per day do I have to write?

Right. Time to dive in. I don’t have *no* words, but a lot of what I have is wrong, or old, or stupidly written. Don’t expect anything from me that isn’t coloured by STRESS and SCIENCE. They are, of course: orange, and ultraviolet.

And yes, this is exactly the kind of sloppy maths to prove a point that I will be using in my research, since you ask.

I’ve joined Quora, and answered this question there. It was well received so I thought I’d share it here too. Any other perspectives would be very welcome.

I will offer the experience of a PhD student in an academic environment:

The Good

• Being surrounded by clever people - it’s a joy to be able to have interesting conversations with co-workers about more than the latest X-Factor contestant.
• Being able to work on, at least to some extent, what you’re interested in.
• The kick you get when you discover something new.
• Being paid to read around interesting subjects.
• Having intellectually challenging work to do.
• Designing experiments gets you using your creative side.
• Managing your own schedule - no 9am starts for me!
• The idea that one day you might discover something really important and useful can keep you going when things are hard.
• Going around the world meeting like-minded people and showing off your work to them at international conferences.
• This only really applies to an academic environment, but teaching undergraduates is something I enjoy.

The Bad

• Grant applications - you will spend a good proportion of your time applying for funding from bodies who appear to allocate it stochastically.
• Paper submissions - whilst it is nice to have your work published and acknowledged it is very hard work getting a paper to a standard where it will be accepted by a journal. It also take a lot of review time before you get the satisfaction of a positive answer. This is also where ‘Publish or Perish’ comes in - if you aren’t churning out roughly 2 papers a year you go off everyone’s radar and you will find promotions aren’t happening and grants dry up, no matter how exemplary your research.
• The boring, day-to-day data gathering, sorting, testing and retesting and retesting again that is very important for scientific rigour.
• Being paid less that you would be if you had a ‘real’ job.
• Doing things that are sometimes quite hard to trace back to their impact on reality - how useful is it that I can teach a machine to recognise beautiful music, *really*? Of course, my colleagues who are finding new cures for malaria may have a slightly easier time of it.

The Rest

• As with many jobs, there is a degree of politicking and bureaucracy.
• Some scientists who work for companies are much better paid.
• Some scientists who work for companies don’t have control over what they work on or their hours.
• Part of science is going down the wrong track most of the time. This isn’t necessarily a negative but you have to be able to cope with a lot of your work turning out essentially fruitless before you hit on something that works.

The answer to the question depends on who is asking. For me? Somewhat. Might be time to do something a little more directly connected to being useful, at least for a while.

I am asked this at least once a day by someone or other so I thought I’d post about it. I have little in the way of content apart from what papers and reports I’ve already written for other purposes. I have a very long list of references which is only going to grow. I expect to finish my experiments within a month or two and then get started in earnest writing, which should take 3-6 months. Given that I’ve got 8 months in which to finish as a final deadline, this should be doable. 100′000 words is the limit, but it’s not really about size but content.

In case you’re not aware, dear reader, of what happens after that: you get a “viva voce”, which is a several-hours-long presentation and interview where you a) prove that you know your stuff and therefore probably wrote it yourself rather than paying someone on the internet to do it, and b) defend your work as significant enough, new enough, thorough enough and substantial enough to be considered worth a PhD (Doctor of philosophy, called DPhil in Oxbridge). There are 2 examiners in the viva, one internal and one external, neither of whom can have helped you with your work at any point. After the viva one of several things will happen:

1. You totally fail. This is incredibly rare as people don’t normally make it this far with nothing to show for it, and no supervisor worth her/his salt would put you in for a viva knowing it’s likely to be a fail.
2. You get dropped down to an MPhil. This is worth maybe 1/3 of a PhD, gives you a research masters degree. It happens when you have done some good work, but not enough of it to make a full PhD.
3. Major corrections. You are given a long time (months to a year) to make adjustments to your thesis and do extra work to make it qualify for a PhD.
4. Minor corrections. You are given a short time (weeks to months) to make minor adjustments to your thesis and possibly a little extra work to make it qualify for a PhD. With corrections you don’t have to go through another viva, you just send off your corrections to the examiners and they say if they think you’re done. At this point, you may start referring to yourself as “Doctor”.
5. This never really happens, but occasionally a very clever and thorough person gets a pure pass. Not at all likely.

What do I think will happen to me? Well, I’m probably major or minor corrections. If I did exactly nothing for 8 months it’d be an MPhil. So, some work done, some still to do. If you’re curious as to what it’s been like to do a PhD, Jorge Cham has it covered pretty well - Piled Higher and Deeper!

“What makes music beautiful, then?” - in large part, it’s not putting in things that are awful. After that, the parameters are quite similar to what makes music sad. I can’t really give too many details when I’m trying to publish them - some enterprising soul might get there first!

“Did you enjoy doing a PhD?” - No. But I don’t think that’s the point of a PhD, is it? I have had points of enjoyment but mostly it’s been a long hard slog. I expect to feel satisfied when it’s done. I wouldn’t want to do it twice. If I could go back and pick a different more useful topic, I would.

“Will you be more employable with a PhD?” - Yes, about 5% more employable - it adds the chance to be a postdoc, of which there are very few in the country at the moment because no-one has any money. Hopefully this situation will improve when we properly dig our way out of recession. Every so often people in industry want a PhD holder, too.

“What’s next?” - I have no idea. Research or software engineering, most likely. It is highly dependent on what jobs are out there. Location is no object. Maybe Jim will get a job first and I’ll find one wherever that is, or vice-versa. Looking at the options I am tempted to do a genetics degree so I can work in bioinformatics - that field is huge! Looking for jobs is now my top procrastination device, even above social networks, and, of course: blogging.

[Background: A few years ago I was involved in several relationships at once with the knowledge and consent of all involved. This is known as polyamory.]

It didn’t work for me. I won’t be pursuing this type of relationship in future. Polyamory is a legitimate and happy way for people to live, and I support anyone’s right to do so and not be harassed into persistent justification of their lifestyle. What didn’t work for me was the plate-juggling aspect of trying to keep everyone happy with the level of attention they were getting. I have enough trouble keeping one person happy! I didn’t want extra emotional attachments, I just wanted to be able to sleep with other people. Not very poly. It’s also hard to openly maintain a lifestyle that goes against prevailing social mores - I must admit that’s part of the reason my life is so much easier now.

I am irritated to find myself included in conversations where poly and open relationships are derided, as if “all that’s behind her now, she’s one of us normal people again.” I am tired of speaking up and find myself nodding along to keep the peace. It’s funny - I am now free of being constantly put on the spot about it, but I can’t help but feel that an erasure of history is being attempted. “She made a mistake”, “It was just a phase”, “That was then, this is now” and other dismissive comments about a time in my life that was turbulent and unpleasant but still happened, because I wanted it to happen. I think I needed to go through that to find out where my limits were, so to erase that experience would erase my way of knowing what I want from a relationship. For me, it was a phase, but there’s no call for “just”.

Plenty of people who knew the situation are surprised that I still have anything positive to say about polyamory, but I just don’t feel that my experience is generally how it goes. I had some awful times, but I put that down to the people involved including my own inability to set boundaries until it was far too late. I have met and spoken to several poly groups who are happy (and not suicide cult happy, just normal, everyday happy). They are at the point where the fact they are poly doesn’t even come up that often, they are just getting on with life. I’d wish them the best of luck but they simply don’t need it and it would be patronising to do so. I also have some admiration for their ability to live against the norm, which they aren’t doing for the sake of being alternative but for the sake of their own happiness and authenticity.

Dan Savage recently has something to say about open relationships, which triggered this post.

No really, it is. Well, there goes another year. Did you know that in September I’ll have lived in Aberystwyth for 10 years? Now *that’s* a scary thought.

Last night we went out for drinks and curry and more drinks to celebrate mine and Dave’s birthday, which was very pleasant indeed. This morning Jim brought me a cup of tea and various presents to be opened, and I got more and more excited with each one. Jim got me chocolates and the game Dominion, which I’ve been pining after for a while. Jim’s parents got me a Steelpan with which I annoyed him for most of the morning. My Dad got me a set of decent headphones and a flute of a type I’ve never seen before - will have to investigate. Kevin deposited a beer on my desk which I didn’t notice for ages as I’m highly unobservant. Sandy got me the Game of Life Adventures, which should be a laugh if I can contain my feminism/alternativism for long enough. (”What, you can only be married to *one* person at once?”, “What, you can’t have children unless you’ve had a wedding?” “What, the career cards are blue, and the family cards are pink? What are they trying to subconsciously imply?”) - You get the idea.

Today, I’m in work as usual, but I may be leaving early because, hey, it’s my birthday, I shouldn’t be here at all, right?

At the weekend I may be sponging a lift down to Pontypridd for a different Dave’s birthday if I can justify disappearing on Jim right before he buggers off to Belgium for a week on holiday for work.

This result, truly the first result from the 8ball, amused me:

This is the sort of thing I do with my day.

If you noticed my site being down for a little while, you’re one of the select few, an elite group that as far as I know only contains my Dad. Hi, Dad! If you’re reading this, I’ve managed to repoint the DNS correctly. Go me! So, I’m now in control of (and paying for) my own hosting, and this is a good thing, I think. Who knew what a compsci masters graduate could manage when she absolutely couldn’t put it off any longer…

A comment or two would help in order to reassure me I’ve done it right and it’s not my hosts file fooling me. Lemme know.

Dan writes about the Aber Effect, inspired by Adam apparently.

I’ve been feeling it a lot since I’m one of the few who is *still* stuck here, and the lifestyle Liz has described was sort of whipped out from under me — at least that’s how it seemed! But I, too, am coming to terms with the fact this mass exodus had to happen sooner or later, and I’d be feeling similar even if I were the one who’d moved. I’m looking forward to getting out, eventually, maybe getting that push to grow up a little. The students are only getting younger and thus more irritating, plus I have less and less desire to make friends who are going to bugger off in at most 3 years. To be sure, there’s still enough people around that I can go for a pint at short notice, and I do appreciate that, but we’re all a lot older and busier than we used to be and we have to be in bed by 11!

What Ruth commented on Kit’s blog about the family in Aber is true, and I doubt I’ll ever be part of such a close group again. I’m going to have to break the habits of a lifetime and get good at long-distance, because it’s never going to be as easy as it has been here to make friends and maintain friendships. On the plus side, I hear outside of Aber you can go to things called “nightclubs” and “comedy venues” not to mention “see a band” (without driving for 3 hours) so I’m looking forward to all that. Scratch the nightclubs, actually.

It’s an open day today, and throwing Aber open day tradition to the wind, the weather isn’t great (cloudy, and windy). There are still nervous young’uns wandering about with yellow bags, and their parents look as worried as they always do. One day I’d like to be a worried parent at a university open day, making sure they’ve picked the right place and they’ve got their meal vouchers and they aren’t going to drink too much and they’ll definitely call me once a week (Sorry, Dad). And that shows a change in me I’d never have thought possible. So, I’m not worried about stagnating, nor wallowing in nostalgia. I miss the closeness, both figurative and literal. But I no longer think it’s the end of the world as we know it. I feel fine.