Minimalist lifestyles

Something that's become apparent to me since I got home is the relatively small amount of stuff I regularly use. I mean, most of my friends who were in my year would have got houses in 2002 whilst I've been living out of one room. And anyone who saw my room in House 3 at Trevs will know how small that was. But instead of seeing this as a drag it's really liberating. I've been trying to help my parents clean out our house and the amount of crap they keep for no reason is unbelievable. By living in such a small environment for so many years I've become accustomed to streamlining my stuff. I still find it really hard to throw things away - especially things with nostalgia value but you've got to do it. It's like 5 minutes of anguish after you bin it and that's it - you don't miss it. Matt and I coined the term minimalist lifestyle to reflect the lifestyle we've been living. I really love the idea of having one suitcase of clothes, a backpack of other items, a laptop and one trunk for shipping other things. In fact, when it looked like I might spend 6 months in the US teaching I was really excited to try out my ideas. Buy a laptop, put all my films into a 240-disc wallet, have all my music on my ipod, a suitcase of clothes and perhaps a trunk with slightly bulkier stuff. I used to think about taking a guitar as it's become so important in my life, but after seeing this I probably wouldn't even need one of those.

(watch all the way through cos when I saw it I thought "blah blah, whatever," but the sound is so good that I'm going to have to get this). My parents have filled the house with books but I love the idea of ebooks - Sony have already introduced their e-reader. Instead of shelves and shelves of books, imagine a device about the area of an A4 piece of paper that can hold as many books as you can fit onto a memory card. My friend Spike seems to have taken the opposite view. He moved to Australia for 3 years and decided to take as much of his stuff with him as possible to the point that one of his trunks had problems at customs due to the antique pistols in them...

I know that I'll probably get overrun with important documents and end up with a house full of crap, but it's nice to dream.

Durham, vivas and camera phones

The thing I remember most about my graduation is what an anticlimax it was. No, let me go further than that - it was a massive let down. The week leading up to it was severely lacking in atmosphere in college - everyone seemed worn down and tired and as soon as people's parents arrived that was it. In addition to having to get up at 6.30am to get to Palace Green in time for the 7am gown fitting (read: no hot water in college) as we came out from the ceremony all my friends scattered and everything got muddled into a big confusing mess - then it was over. When I walked back to my office after my viva a little over ten days ago I was feeling the same thing. I'd been anticipating this moment for nearly 4 years - 3 years of work and half a year of writing had been wrapped up and "OK'd". In my 5th year I remember thinking that this moment would fill me with sheer elation. It didn't.

In the days and hours leading up to the viva I was actually starting to get really worried about how un-worried I was about it all. After all, this was the test to determine whether the last 3 years of work had been up to the right standard. I did a shockingly low amount of revision. I know Matt spent 2 months revising if I'm honest I think I probably did about a weeks worth. In fact, when I read my thesis through the night before it was actually the first time I'd read it since handing it in. The viva itself was incredibly quick only 1hr45 which is shorter than the average. To my surprise my external examiner started off my telling me that they had been really impressed by my thesis and didn't see any problems with it. Straight away this knocked me off balance as it was the last thing I expected. It felt awful as I took a long time to answer some of the questions and there were some (it felt like most of them) where I had to say "I'm not sure". Looking back, all the questions I struggled on were on pretty simple things and all the questions I breezed through involved the complex stuff. Thankfully there were only a few mistakes and I struggled through a couple of mechansims. At 1hr40 my external examiner said he was done. I couldn't believe it was over, but then invited my internal examiner to ask some questions. I settled down and figured I was only half way through, but amazingly there was only one more question. I couldn't believe it when they asked me to step outside. The deliberation took less than a minute and then I was a doctor.

It didn't really feel over. I've come to realise I need to let go of it - in the last 15 months or so I've just about made myself physically sick worrying about my work - why didn't my reaction work? Would it mean I fail or have to do more lab work? It felt like I was running out of time and starting to panic. My PhD has been such a large part of my life for the last 3 and a half years. I brought it home with me, I'd go into the lab in the evenings and weekends if I needed to. In the last year especially I tried to keep my mind on work to see if I could turn my run of luck around. I just assumed that it was like this for everyone - but of course it's not. In the "real world" people really can leave their jobs at work. To me I feel really disappointed with my last year's work, but taking my work as a whole it looks ok. As predicted, all the congratulations I got was of the "we expected you to pass" variety rather than the "wow I'm so happy for you" variety.

So yes, the feeling of elation was missing but at least I got to see my friends again. On my first night back I met up with Brett and Tim and went out for some (ok, quite a few) drinks. The next day I went out for lunch with the girls from my group which is always nice. My biggest regret about my PhD was not being able to get my group out more often. Apart from Christmas meals I think it may have only happened 3 times in 3 years and the shame was we had a good time when we did make it out. Oh well. In addition to the chemistry crowd, Matt had made the journey up from London and Alan was around too. I even managed to get Kate from my lab out for a bit too. The night followed the tried and tested path of the New Inn followed by pizza, Jimmy Allen's, Chase and Klute. It was like I'd never left - how I've missed the dodgy green double vodka-pseudo Red Bulls in Klute. The next day I met up with the chemists again and went for lunch in the new section of the Gala complex and then in the evening had a night in Trevs with Matt and Emma. The nostalgia of Pizza Perfect was in attendance (along with the piss-poor free Lambrini) and the next day I went to dinner at Khairul's house with the chemists after which we sat around and chatted. It was simple moments like this that I miss so much. We had about 10 PhD chemists (and Lou) sat around in their sitting room talking - something that we'd done a load before and not really something that would seem that special - but once you leave it's so rare you actually see 5 of your friends.

I have to mention mobile phones again - my small camera's screen has packed in and I didn't fancy hauling my Canon round so I relied on my friends' camera phones. My phone may be able to tell me about the public transport networks in every city in the world and have sat-nav, but the camera is just rubbish. The photos in this post have come straight from Emma's phone - armed with a Carl Zeiss lens and xenon flash. I'm seriously impressed with the quality - especially the ones from Klute. I may have to invest soon.

Just as when I went up in December it felt like I'd never left and all the things I've loved about my PhD came back whilst talking to people. I've met people from Australia, Germany, France, Thailand, Japan, China, Malaysia, Holland and loads more countries, I've loved every minute of teaching the undergraduates, I've travelled to the USA and Japan to see some of the top people in my area talk, I've learnt to take nothing at face value, I still feel young and even though I was really scared about my work there was never a moment when I didn't love it and that's the most important thing. A lot of people my age already hate their jobs and a lot of others are indifferent to them. Even at my hight of failures I was always excited to go into work to see if my reaction had worked. Now, if only I could feel excited about my result - I've got 4 months until graduation #2.

Over

I passed. I am now (just about) Dr Kiran. Now to get all my bank cards ammended...

Belief

So it's come down to this. I'm sat in the university library. In just under 18 hours I'll be going into my PhD viva. It's essentially the last hurdle to the completion of the work that began all those years ago in 2003. Essentially an examiner from another university (Strathclyde) and an examiner from Durham will spend around 3 hours discussing my thesis and work with me. This boils down to them asking lots of questions to test my knowledge of the subject and related areas.

I'm not overly nervous, but I'm getting the feeling I used to get before exam results - I'm pretty sure it's going to be OK, but what if it's not?. Everyone I've seen has offered up a "Good luck, I'm sure you'll be fine." but I just feel like I need someone to go further than that and tell me that they believe in me and that I will get through this and perhaps even more important be proud of me when/if I do well. Otherwise what is it? - just another piece of paper to stick on the wall and a couple more letters after my name. Being a doctor seemed a really cool thing to be three years ago, but now I can't quite remember why...

So - come on me!

My problem with...education

So, by this time next week I will hopefully have passed the final hurdle to become a doctor. This is just about the end of the education chain in the this country and I've been thinking about all the problems it has. This is mostly coming from a science point of view, but it's probably very similar for other subjects. I was always told that staying in education would boost your options and get you onto the employment ladder at a higher level.

So anyway, I arrived at uni with a high A grade in chemistry. I was weary but at the same time confident that I'd be ok. At A-level it seemed like a single straight path towards the goal and as such progress was steady. A degree on the other hand is more akin to trying to get to the centre of a circle taking many different paths at once. Many different courses ran at the same time apparently bearing no relationship to each other in the least. Where as A-levels are designed to a national curriculum, degrees are made up of what each university decides is relevant and taught be people whose job isn't to teach. Lectures are just that: lectures. There is no effort to make sure the audience understood the content. It becomes so easy to get fixated on individual courses and forget what it all means. For example, most people will recognise the chemical structure of benzene - a hexagon whose vertices represent a carbon atom and the edges of which represent bonds. It's all too easy to forget that in reality these lines aren't really there - they are just a cloud of electrons that's holding the atoms together. In one course we learn how molecules in a fluid stretch, twist and concertina. Other course make no mention of this at all, but it still happens. All the courses are linked, but no one tells you that.

The biggest problem though is that, unlike subjects like maths and physics where it's entirely possible to get near-perfect marks, chemistry's questions can have very vague answers. It becomes a common struggle to keep getting decent grade. In other subjects you can cover up on or two bad modules and still get a high degree, but in chemistry it always felt like one mess up would drag you down. Nowhere was this felt more than in the practical classes. Arguably this is what chemistry is all about. All the courses simply showed reactions as being A + B goes to C with some explanation of how. What they didn't tell you was how to get A and B into the right states to interact and how to separate C from the mixture of A, B and other assorted crap. The reaction is the easy part - it's the separation and purification that causes all the headaches. I can still remember the fear that ran through lab sessions. People would go to demonstrators if their reaction was a slightly different colour from their friends', people would worry about which layer was the organic layer in extractions and absolutely no one knew how to work the vacuum pump trolleys. As the second year came it got worse - 2-day experiments brought the prospect of getting to the end of nearly 12 hours of lab work and then loosing your product at the end. There were good demonstrators and bad demonstrators. I remember one who told me that if we didn't operate the vacuum pumps correctly they would "blow up and take your legs off". Not really what you want to hear. Another demonstrator would quite happily wreck your experiment and then cheerfully proclaim "oh well, there's still time to start again." The grading system didn't exactly work wonders either. We got a memo from a lecturer saying it was actually against university policy to give grades as opposed to marks but they were going to do it anyway. Getting back a lab report with A+ initially seemed pretty good, but then you realised that was only 15/20 with absolutely no indication of where the last 25% had been dropped. In a subject like chemistry, every mark counts. Worse still, it now transpires that natural scientists can actually finish their degree (incorporating chemistry) without setting foot in a chemistry lab. How has that happened? When I started my PhD and went back into labs as a demonstrator I saw the fear again. I also tried to be helpful. I tried to explain to people why they were adding what they were adding. Once you know it makes sense and will help you with every other reaction, but there were still a lot of demonstrators who would simply fob the students off with non-committal answers.

My main beef though is with opportunities after university. Far too many people are lured into accountancy and other such mass graduate-employers. There always seems to be worries that not enough people are taking sciences, but I'm finding it pretty hard to get a decent job. The area I'm into is growing rapidly and there is a lot of money in it. Just apparently not in the UK though. One of my friends from my group recently left chemistry after a 3 year post-doc stint to take up teaching. I've got nothing against people teaching if they want to do it, but I get the feeling people are being driven to it by a lack of opportunities. My friend had basically reached the end of apparent career path in the UK and made the switch. The teaching adverts all about helping to develop the next generation of world-class students. But what happens when these world-class students reach the end of their education? What if they are forced back to teaching? How does that benefit anyone? It brings up a thought that sometimes keeps me awake. How many Einsteins and Schrodingers have not lived up to their potential cos they chose a different path from the one where their talents lay. Imagine if you yourself had done a different degree or taken a different job. Would you have changed the world? It's that kind of thinking that does your head in.