Although it can seem like a straitjacket at times, one of the positive things about being deep into a major project like a Ph.D. thesis is that it forces you to focus – and the further you get into the process, the more you have to put interesting but irrelevant new ideas to one side, and concentrate on the job in hand.
I actually found this restriction quite useful, as it helped me to concentrate my efforts on producing tangible results, rather than being constantly distracted by the latest novel idea to pop up in my Twitter feed. I have what have politely been referred to as ‘a very broad range of interests’, (a.k.a., a butterfly mind), and now that my Ph.D. is complete, the temptation to overcompensate for all that focus and discipline by trying to investigate everything I come across, simultaneously, is quite large. Given infinite time and resources, I would already have started research projects on knitting carbon fibre, visualising vocal cords, teaching maths and programming through dance, and the social history of pollution – and those are just for starters. I would also be learning R, Python, FORTRAN & Smalltalk, along with Chinese, French, German and Spanish, and ballroom dancing. That’s tonight’s list, anyhow. It’ll be different tomorrow.
In a way, this is good news. I rarely have a problem coming up with lists of things I would like to know more about, or do better. I am perpetually curious and I enjoy learning. The tricky bit is finding a way of applying that curiosity to things my employer is willing and able to pay me to do. That means topics which have funding available, and topics which fit into departmental or institutional priorities. It also means focusing on things I’m actually reasonably good at. That immediately shortens the list: the number of things that I’m both good at and interested in, which also overlap with my faculty’s research strategy, is actually quite small. I know this, because ever since last summer I’ve been pursuing what was effectively a small-scale research project to work out what my next research project(s) will be. As far as I know right now, knitting carbon fibre and dancing wave functions haven’t made the cut.
Maybe next year…?
Wheeeeee-heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! 🙂
Yep, that’s right; I’m now officially Dr. Southall. The letter from Liverpool University arrived last week. My office door is already adorned with a new name plate, and I’ve changed my work e-mail signature to include the all-important extra three letters. Well, OK, they aren’t really that important in the big scheme of things, but they represent a lot of work and a pretty big achievement for me, so I’m having fun doing the updates.
Part-time degrees always take a long time, and part-time Ph.Ds even more so; getting a Ph.D isn’t a quick process even when it’s done full-time. Since I started working on mine, I’ve got married, moved house twice, moved office four times, and changed job (within the same institution) twice – all while working full-time on my ‘day job’. Put that way, maybe it’s not so surprising that it’s taken the thick end of a decade, although it does sometimes feel as though I must have been slacking somewhere along the way to let it take that long. Truth be told, I did continue to do some music and quite a lot of walking, but I doubt if I would have stayed sufficiently sane and healthy to keep going otherwise.
So, for anyone who’s thinking about setting out on the part-time Ph.D (plus full-time job) path, what’s it like? What does it involve?
The first thing to say is that every Ph.D is unique, and so is every Ph.D student. The things I found hard might be a doddle for someone else, and vice versa. But in case it helps, here’s a rough chronology of how things went for me:-
- 2005 : I realised that I had an idea for a research study, access to data, and a potential supervisor. (Actually the last of these to fall into place was the supervisor; I’d had a bad experience, supervision-wise, with my M.Sc. dissertation, so I was very, very careful about finding a supervisor for my Ph.D. Fortunately, I was also lucky, and that side of my Ph.D has worked out very well.) I started to put together ideas for how the project would work, and find out about the application process operated. I knew I was fortunate in that my employer was willing to pay my tuition fees. What I didn’t know at the time was just how many years of tuition fees were going to be required! Oh, and during 2005 I moved house, and also changed my job, moving temporarily from my academic department to a role organising short professional training courses.
- 2006 : In 2006, I moved house again. I also filled in a Ph.D application form, got the relevant signatures from managers and referees, and produced a 10,000-word proposal document. This led to an interview in around September 2006. I was accepted onto the course, to start in January 2007.
- 2007 – 2010 : In a way, the background work for my research goes back years before I even started thinking about a Ph.D, but 2007 was the year when I started organising interviews, and trying to work out what literature I needed to review, in earnest. 2007 was also the year in which I got married, so it was a pretty busy and exciting time. Over the next couple of years I collected 30 interviews, scanned in a couple of hundred photographs, arranged for recordings to be transcribed, and generally got on with the day job. It was an enjoyable phase in many ways, but I was still very uncertain what angle I was going to take to discuss the large volume of data I was collecting. Attending and presenting at several conferences did help with this process; there’s nothing like knowing you’re going to have to explain your work to other people to force you to decide what you think it means!
- 2011-2012 : During this period, life got in the way quite substantially. At the start of 2011 I was still seconded to the training unit outside my academic department, but half-way through the year it was announced that my home department was to be ‘downsized’. Like everyone else involved, I had to go through a process of justifying my continued employment. This took several months, and was very stressful. Once the process was over, I moved back into the department permanently. That first year back was also stressful, because of knock-on effects from the recent redundancies. Perhaps not surprisingly, progress on my Ph.D slowed down a lot at this point. However, I did complete the transcription and coding of interview data, and passed fairly smoothly through the process of upgrading from M.Phil to Ph.D study. I also presented talks or posters at several more conferences.
- 2013-2014 : There were a whole series of ‘false summits’ at this point, where I thought I was very close to being ready to submit my thesis, but it turned out that I wasn’t. In the end there was a bit of a mad dash to get everything finished and handed in before my registration deadline at the end of December, 2013. Everything went quiet for a while. In March 2014 I had my first viva, which resulted in a long list of modifications and an extra year to do them in. If life had been busy before, it now got very busy indeed… Coincidentally, summer 2014 was also the year in which my department was transferred wholesale into a brand new faculty, on a brand new site. By the end of 2014, I was a bit of a gibbering wreck.
- Q1 to Q3 2015 : The gibbering continued well into 2015. I handed in my modified thesis in March, and things went quiet again – on the thesis front, at least. They were anything but quiet at work! Then, just as teaching drew to a close, it was time for my second viva, which was a much more relaxed and happy affair than the first one. The committee chair hummed and whistled all the way down the corridor to the meeting room, the viva started with the announcement that I had passed my Ph.D, and the rest of the viva was therefore more in the nature of a discussion than an examination. Phew! …. However, that was not the end of the story. Although no further ‘modifications’ were required, there were some ‘corrections’ to do. Most were in the nature of ‘changing the line spacing from double to 1.5 lines’, and other such cosmetic issues, but somehow some actual extra work snuck in there as well. I was beginning to despair of ever actually finishing the thing! However, there was no time to dwell on the matter, because back in the day job there was a mountain of marking to do. Once I’d done that, I got on with the thesis corrections. Then I went on holiday, did a programming course, finished the corrections, and handed in yet another printed copy.
- Q4 2015 : At last!!!!! The internal examiner approved my corrections (plus a few corrections to the corrections), and in October I was instructed to get four hard bound copies made. I must admit I hadn’t realised quite how expensive these were going to be; that’s £200 I’ll not be seeing again. It was worth it though. The final versions were satisfyingly heavy and really quite lovely to look at. Or maybe they just look beautiful to me, because they’re mine? Whatever – I like them! Back I went to the graduate school office once again, to hand in the hard bound copies, and yet again, everything went quiet. I had several more weeks to wait before the awards board at Liverpool sat to formally approve the award of my degree. That board sat in late November, and I received my formal notification last week. My certificate will apparently arrive some time later in December, and I’ll graduate at the Chester ceremony next spring.
So, that’s it, in a nutshell. My journey to becoming a ‘Dr’, and earning the right to wear a scarlet robe instead of a black one. There has certainly been a lot of hard intellectual work, a lot of writing, and a lot of editing, but the other thing that it’s required is a lot of persistence. If there’s a single factor that’s necessary to succeed as a part-time Ph.D student, I’m guessing that might be it. But that’s just my story. Your mileage may very well differ…
The hardbound version of my Ph.D thesis in all its 100,000+ words of glory.
It’s done; it’s finished; it’s been handed in for the very last time. I’m simultaneously proud of it and pleased to see the back of it. There will be no more re-writes, no more extra bits and no more final, final, final, really-the-last-one editing sessions. Well, at least, not until the next big project comes along… (and I’ve got a few of those on the drawing board already).
But for now, this is it – job done. All I’m waiting for now is the official letter from the University of Liverpool in a few weeks time. As to-do list ‘ticks’ go, this is a pretty big one.
Four copies of ten years’ work add up to a lot of paper and board. This is how I reckon I’ll look when I stagger into the Graduate School with the final product next week…
Well, it’s very nearly official…. (my soon-to-be doctorate, that is).
Today I took four copies of the final, final, final version of my Ph.D. thesis to the bookbinder. Three copies will disappear into various university libraries, via a final approval committee at the University of Liverpool some time in November. The fourth will live on my bookshelf.
Nearly there…!
It’s good to see that modern zombie researchers* take Health and Safety seriously. You can never be too careful with hordes of the ravenous undead around.
Elf & Safety, & Zombies
The full paper is available here.
*As the author of the paper makes clear, that’s people who research about zombies, not zombies who do research. It’s an important distinction.
My first degree was a Joint Honours B.Sc. in Music & Physics. The music part has remained a serious hobby, and provided the raw material for my Ph.D study, but the physics has always been the basis of how I earn my living. I’m therefore enthusiastic about the trend for ‘physical computing’, which involves messing about with resistors and soldering irons as well as coding. It’s great to get back, literally, to the nuts and bolts of the hardware.
I’ve therefore been spending a chunk of this weekend assembling an Arduino DIY Gamer kit; a very enjoyable process, especially if like me you enjoy both physics and crafts. You do have to read the instructions carefully though! I thought I had, but discovered too late that I’d fixed the IR transmitter in at the wrong angle, and it proved impossible to remove without breaking something. (This won’t stop the kit as a whole from working, but might make multi-player gaming via IR a bit flaky.) I also managed to fix the battery terminals in the wrong way around! Fortunately they were easier to get out again than the IR TX, and fitted back in after a bit of filing and resoldering. The kit is now working, and after a couple of tries I’ve also got the Arduino IDE downloaded onto my Mac, and talking to the Gamer. Next stop, Space Invaders!
The Arduino kits are supported by excellent web-based resources, including instruction manuals and videos.
I needed this one! It’s been a very long time since I soldered anything.
A change of iron tip was needed for the soldering towards the top of this image, as everything was rather small and close together.
Soldering finished, and all the electronics are now assembled.
It works! 🙂 On startup, it displays a ‘Snake’ game.
Brightly coloured plastic shields bolt on to protect the most delicate components.
Fully assembled DIY Gamer.
The next step is to connect the Gamer to a computer, download the IDE and examples, and start programming.
Now, instead of Snake, the Arduino displays an animated Alien. The code is one of the examples provided with the Gamer software toolkit.
Another example is this animated smiley face. It’s all working now. Time to get coding….
Recently I’ve been busy organising a day of events on the science and engineering of bicycles, featuring presentations by the cycling and science journalist Max Glaskin. You see more about these events on my other blog at:-
https://whelkblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/coming-soon-to-chester-cycling-science-the-himalayas-25th-april-2015/
and:-
https://whelkblog.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/cycling-science-the-himalayas/
“Five copies for binding…”
It’s a funny thing, this thesis-writing business. The hand-in deadline – 31st December 2013 – has been on my mind and on the horizon for ages. I have been ‘approaching submission’ for a couple of years at least, a bit like a tiny space probe heading for a very large but very distant planet. I travelled & travelled, but the planet never seemed to get any closer. And then all of a sudden it was the only thing in sight, touchdown was frighteningly imminent, and there was an awful lot to do in a very short time. This was of course the point at which Word decided to have conniptions about the size of some of my files – thank you, Scrivener backups, for saving the day and my sanity! Then there was the minor problem of getting long complicated documents to output to PDF format for printing. I have done this many times for shorter, simpler documents with no trouble at all, by using ‘print to pdf’ from within Word. Suffice it to say that on this occasion I ended up printing all five lots of 380 pages myself from the Word documents, which was probably doing things the hard way, but it got the job done.
And then it was Tuesday afternoon, just after the end of the Autumn term. Retro-rockets were firing and kicking up moon dust and the altitude figures were suddenly in feet rather than miles… And meanwhile back on planet earth, four copies of my finished thesis – all 380 pages of prose, photos, quotes and references – were now bound and labelled and on their way to Senate House. At Reception, a lady from the Graduate School appeared, disappeared, and reappeared again clutching a form, a pen and a clipboard. I filled in the form and handed it back, at which point Ms Grad School smiled, said nice things like ‘well done’ and disappeared again with the cardboard box of thesis copies and the paperwork.
And that, for the time being, is that. I am not yet ‘Dr Southall’; in fact, I’m in Ph.D limbo. I know I’ll have a viva some time in the next three months or so, but apart from that, for the first time since I officially set out on this voyage almost eight years ago, I’m not in control of what happens next. It’s a tiny bit disconcerting. However, it’s a pleasant sort of disconcerting in many ways. For a start, and unlike last year, I won’t be working through most of the Christmas ‘holiday’, trying to get a full draft of all chapters completed. This year I can take time off to go walking, watch Poirot and Time Team, and finish knitting that jumper at last with a relatively clear conscience. I might even get started on the knitted woodlouse I’ve been planning for several months now. On balance, this particular limbo is actually quite bearable!
Happy Christmas everyone!
The Spherical Horse in a Vacuum
(A Work in Progress, Physicist-Style)
Back in the dark, distant days before the World Wide Wibble, the sort of memes which nowadays pop up on Facebook walls and geeky websites still existed; they just had to find other ways of spreading themselves from one susceptible brain to another. The invention of the photocopier had much to answer for in this respect, and many a 1980s student flat or postgrad cubby-hole had grubby marks, cracks and mysterious stains on the walls covered by greying photostats of circulating humour. Failing to open a can of beans in the manner appropriate to one’s scientific stereotype was a common theme. Much of the rest was to do with beer, coffee and peculiar smells.
For some reason all this nerdy silliness came back to me at the weekend when I was looking for a story summing up the dangers of excessive reliance on theory, and was immediately put in mind of the case of the spherical horse. That’s what a physics degree does to you I’m afraid. It’s lifelong and totally incurable. For those fortunate enough to have avoided this fate, I should probably explain that getting as far as graduation in this discipline tends to involve a lot of very complicated maths, much of which is applied to strangely simple theoretical examples. All perfectly fine in its natural habitat, but the approach sometimes needs a bit of tweaking if it’s to be useful anywhere else.
Anyhow, back to that unfortunate equine… The story comes in many guises, involving various domestic birds and beasts from chickens to camels, but the version I remember involves a super-rich oil tycoon with a passion for horse-racing. His horses did well, but he wanted them to do better, and he figured that if physicists could work out how to split the atom, they ought to be clever enough to get his horses running that tiny bit faster as well. He advertised, and in due course a physicist arrived and set to work with computer and hideously complex formulae. Six months later, the tycoon was starting to wonder when he was going to start seeing results from his very considerable investment. (Even theoretical physicists need funding, don’t you know?) He summoned said physicist to his office.
“How’s it going?” he asked. “Where are my winners? My world record holders? My timeless, immortal fame?”
“Oh, it’s going really well,” replied the physicist. “In fact, I got a solution just yesterday.”
“Great!” said the tycoon. “Let’s go racing….!”
“Er… not quite yet, Sir….”
“You see, so far, I’ve only solved the problem for the case of a spherical horse in a vacuum…..”
Meme Network 
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