Foreign Conferences

In 2008 I got to go to two international conferences. the first, in July, was the Fpi8 conference in Graz, Austria. The FPi series alternates between Europe, the US and Japan and Fpi8 marked my attendance of the complete set - Ithaca 2004, Osaka 2006 and now Graz. I was going with Martin, Mustafa and Pete from Chemistry and Torsten from CDT. While the others opted to fly down to Stansted and then out to graz, I thought of my FlyingBlue miles and flew to Austria via Amsterdam and then got the train to Graz. Both options turned out to work well and by the end of the Sunday we were all sitting down to a large Austrian meal under a large canvas roof. Soon, the rain developed into a full blown storm which made sitting outside interesting.




The difference between this and other conferences I had been to was that this time I was making an oral presentation rather than just defending a poster. Before that though I sat through 4 days of talks on functionalised pi-systems. Since Ithaca, academic interest has shifted from OLED materials to transistors (OTFT) and solar cells (OPV). Infact, most OELD talks were towards the end of the conference. The talk went well, even though I was introduced as "mister" grrr. The first one is supposed to be the hardest, so that boded well for the next conference. Instead of going on the organised excursions, Pete and I wandered around graz - which is a fairly small city - taking in all the sites from the weird "alien" buildings of the culture centre and the river-slug to the Schlossberg and clocktower that overlooks the city (taking the hillside train was a much better option than walking).




The second conference was at the start of September in Dresden. This time I was the only chemist in our visiting party made up of Andy, Olivier, Ben and mot of Andy's Ph.D. students. A flight via Dusseldorf left us in the tiny Dresden airport trying to figure out the ticket machine. It ended up stumping us. Our hotel was next to the train station and, apart from registering at the conference site, out first day and a half was free so we made good use of it wandering around the reconstructed Dresden.
Unlike blitzed cities in the UK, Dresden took a long time to be rebuilt and the extra care that's gone into it is evident - the buildings have been rebuilt to maintain a traditional feel rather than just throw up concrete buildings like we did. The end result is a much more pleasant cities than somewhere like Coventry.



A with Austria we enjoyed some excellent food - and took advantage of Andy's knowledge and contacts to get to some restaurants most tourists wouldn't including a Thai restaurant on the edge of the city and a chicken restaurant. The conference ws solely focussed on OLEDs with an emphasis on device physics and engineering, but there was still a bit of chemistry. The session my talk was in lost most of it's participants as the first 2 of 4 speakers hadn't shown up, but some of the audience had returned for my talk - which was a more complete version of the one from Graz. A Special mention has to go to the conference banquet which had some awesome food on offer, including the very moreish veal slices... Hopefully 2009 will bring a few more conferences my way.

Graduation and alumni weekend - a double header

The 29th June 2007 marked my second Durham graduation. I've written about how the first was a big let-down, so this time I wasn't expecting as much but it turned out really well. I met my parents in town and we went to Oldfields for lunch which was really nice - the food was great and we were there at the same time as Matt and his entourage and Nick from Engineering.



After that Matt and I walked over to Palace Green to gown up. For some reason they had a multitude of PhD gowns there, but only a select few sizes of hat - this resulted in Matt and I having hats that shifted around a lot over the afternoon. We filed over to the Castle where we met up with the other graduands - along with the other PhD and undergraduate chemists we were also paired with historians. The PhD chemists were split between those from my year who had managed to get submitted in time and those left over from the year before. This included Carl and Lue so there was a total of 4 Trevs' chemists getting their PhDs.



After we were paraded across to the cathedral we were seated in the EXTREMELY narrow seats. They were connected together but clearly weren't meant to be used by adults when in this configuration. With us all rammed in the temperature started to go up dramatically and the gowns and hats didn't help at all. As the ceremony started the historians were called up first. Once again it was quite fun to watch the different techniques used to shake Bill Bryson's hand. Some people looked embarrassed to be there and tried to get off the stage as quickly as possible without looking Bill in the face, others sneaked in the two-hand shake. As our cramped conditions became almost unbearable the historians seemed to keep on coming. Finally they were finished and attention turned to the chemists. Once again as we got ever-closer to the front of the queue the nerves began to appear - were our hats on straight (a new problem since the first graduation), how many steps were there and could we navigate them without falling over and most importantly of all you had to go up at the right moment
and hope they pronounced your name right. right. There were no major foul-ups and when we got back to the seats I decided to leave a spare seat to alleviate the cramped conditions. This seemed to throw a lot of people off as they weren't sat where they had been before. Bill Bryson gave his speech, which although funny was pretty short and apparently an almost word-for-word repeat of his speeches from previous years.



After we got out of the cathedral we all managed to stay in roughly the same place so we got in a lot of group photos and then we tracked down Bill Bryson and got our picture taken with him. We bumped in Maggie and our college tutor John which was nice and a lot of our chemistry friends turned up to see us. All in all it was a lot better than the chaos of 2003.



After this we bundled off the parents and handed back the gowns (our graduation was the last of the week so we couldn't wander around town in the gowns) and headed over to the New Inn. This day also marked the start of Trevs' alumni weekend so the New Inn slowly started filling up with familiar face from recent years. Eventually we dragged ourselves up the hill and into the bar. We got chatting to various people and after a few hours went out to experience Love Shack for the first time - it was pretty rammed and we didn't get back until about 3am. The next day brought the relief of brunch and then a free day until the formal. Alumni weekend is all about the drinking these days - the only events are the buffet in the bar on the Friday and the formal/late license on the Saturday. We turned up to the drinks reception and found a surprisingly large number of 1999 matriculants there.



We had a really good formal chatting to those around us at the table. Afterwards we slipped back into our old formal routine of mingling and chatting to people, dancing round the bar and ending up on the cobbles chatting to even more people. We had an amazing night and the best part was that although I had looked forward to seeing certain people - Matt, Mel, Alan, Brett and Sarah etc. it was really fun chatting to all those people that Matt and I used to chat to in the bar and formals like Gareth and Fran. It was really good to catch up with all those people that I will probably only hear from very rarely.



The next day, absolutely everyone I saw looked like death warmed up. Which was amusing. All in all the weekend was absolutely amazing and the only bad point was that it had to end. Roll on next year (although no more graduations for me now.)

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.