Future Plans

The past two weeks have been glorious. The weather has played ball and I’ve managed to squeeze in two weeks on holiday with my boyfriend: one in Canterbury eating seafood and the other at home enjoying a well deserved rest - but it had to end sometime. This week I was back to work at the lab and with the new academic year about to start my thoughts have turned to the future. I never like to plan too far ahead (though my google calendar fills up pretty fast these days and makes sure I don’t miss anything important). However, I do think you need to take some time to reflect on everything that’s happened once in a while to make sure you’re making the most of all the opportunities you’ve been given.

Over the past year I’ve changed quite a lot. Giving talks is a lot less daunting now, due to the sheer volume I’ve had to present, and I’ve become a little more confident at attending group meetings and seminars at the lab. I’ve learnt a new computer language, how to play croquet and that sometimes it is the instrument’s fault not the players (as evidenced by my ‘new’ violin (~1920’s) sounding a million times better than my old one despite my playing!).

I’m starting to feel quite settled at MSSL now. This academic year will be the first that I haven’t moved house since I’ve been at university, and I’m really enjoying knowing where everything is. It’s nice to be able to focus on getting the balance right between work and home- but there are plenty of things to distract me!

Next week the advanced summer school starts at MSSL, following on from the one I attended last year. There are social events as well as lectures, and looking forward to catching up with the students I met last year and bowling badly with them at the ice breaker this Sunday (I’m even worse at bowling than I am at croquet!). The summer school is actually at MSSL this time, which is a blessing in some ways as it means I don’t have to worry about travel (and I can slope off to my office if there’s lots of talks that aren’t relevant to me) but I would have liked to go somewhere new! The conferences and meeting I’m attending as part of my PhD keep being in London.

The following week I’m giving a talk at the European Planetary Sciences Congress (EPSC), which could have been anywhere in Europe but just happens to be a UCL this time. How exotic! I’m also going to be helping with the EPSC (in exchange for waiving my attendance fee), which will probably involves I’ll probably be setting up, passing microphones around in sessions and generally making sure everything runs smoothly for most of the conference. There’s also a careers ‘speed dating’ event that I’ve signed up for and I’m helping to organise a stand to show the Ice World’s exhibit at the conference.

After that I really need to work on my PhD – I’ve got another report due in October that I haven’t even started yet, that will briefly outline the first few chapters of my thesis. In addition comet ISON is getting closer to the Sun every second and I really need to predict the sodium tail I expect to see before everyone sees it (can’t really make a prediction after the event unfortunately…). Things should get exciting with ISON around Christmas time so I’d better hurry up if I want my paper to be published. In order to get a PhD you have to prove your research is original and writing a paper that gets published is the easiest way to do that (as it won’t be published in a peer-reviewed journal unless it has never been done before). This time next year I could be a published author!

After the first results start coming out for ISON the comet physics community is holding a session at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting (usually known as AGU, as it’s the bigger of the two annual meetings the union holds). I’ve just recently become a member and am hoping to present my work at this meeting in San Francisco. This relies on not only my abstract being accepted (i.e. AGU deciding my work is good enough to be presented – an abstract is just a short paragraph summarising what you want to show) but also on receiving funding from the Royal Astronomical Society (i.e. that they grant my request for additional funds) – otherwise my PhD budget won’t cover the trip (America is expensive!).

A lot has happened recently that I’m very proud of but there’s always new, exciting opportunities available. I hope that in a year’s time I’ll still have as much to write in my blog - I’ll keep you posted…

My 'old' and 'new' violins. No prizes for guessing which is which!

Mad Week

Many moons ago one of my supervisors asked me to give a talk for a group of amateur astronomers operating in Brighton. At the time I had been happily working on programming and my write up for my report. Summer had seemed an awfully long time away and with no good reason to refuse (apart from I’d never done it before, so I didn’t know what to do – got to learn sometime!) I’d agreed happily, proud to have been asked. However by the time summer came around I’d been volunteering, giving talks to scientists and slaving over my report. I was genuinely shattered by now and feeling guilty for not having done much ‘real’ work for my PhD, but with the reputation of the lab at stake I set about writing a general introductory talk on comets for the Brighton Amateur Astronomy Society. It took a few days to write (more guilt!), as I had to delve into a bit more detail on the background surrounding the formation of comets than had been relevant for my report.

In the end the society was lovely. They are based at Emmaus Brighton, which is a charity that does houses homeless people and gives them meaningful work. I was very impressed with their handmade Analemmatic Sundial (which is one of those life-sized ones where you stand in the middle and tell the time by which marker your shadow points at). All the members were very nice to me (they could clearly tell I was very nervous) and I clearly put on a good enough show because they emailed my supervisor to say thank you! They were very interested in comet ISON (eagerly anticipated at Christmas time this year), and I’ve promised them a follow up when the results start coming in. The same week as all this was going on another opportunity landed on my doorstep that I couldn’t pass up: a night at the Royal Opera House!

One of my favourite things about living in London is the amazing shows that are just on your doorstep. When I was an undergraduate I used to get discount tickets with the theatre society at Imperial, but since then I’ve signed up for all the discounts I can. There are lots of schemes aimed at getting younger people into music and theatre so there a quite a few opportunities for cheap seats if you know where to look. Most theatres also offer discount tickets for students (or sometimes even just under 25’s) wishing to go mid-week. For instance, I’ve been signed up to the Royal Opera House’s Student Scheme for quite a while now and this week they were offering top price tickets to a performance of the Rondine by Puccini, at only £10 each! Despite being very tired from my experience in Brighton (and everything else that had happened recently! - see previous post) I couldn’t pass up the opportunity! 

The plot of Rondine is a little strange. The main character, a woman called Magda, is fed up of being rich and surrounded by rich men. She wants to be loved in that old-fashioned romantic way that only really exists in movies. So she sneeks off, pretending to be penniless, and falls in love with a guy called Ruggero who’s just moved to the city (this is all set in a rather glamorous version of Paris in the 19th century). They fall in love instantly and run off to her country house to escape everything. The only trouble is that Ruggero is actually poor and so after a while she gets bored. She doesn’t want to move in with him and live happily ever after in some pokey little cottage in the countryside, so she tells him it’s over (in that ‘we just can’t be together’ kind of way) and that’s the end of the opera. By the end you don’t really like any of the characters (even Ruggero seems a bit pathetic), except Magda’s maid and her suitor because they’re so entertaining (she’ll say ‘I hate you, I never want to see you again’ and then ‘what time are you picking me up tonight’ almost in the same breath). The music was amazing though and the whole experience of attending the opera at the Royal Opera House was completely different to anything I’ve ever experienced - it really was better in the original language and felt a lot more like a special occasion. A lovely treat at the end of another mad week!

View from my seat at the Royal Opera House - I could see right into the pit!

Royal Treatment: Part 2

Before I even started my volunteering shifts at the Royal Society I was lucky enough to be offered a ticked to see the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory musical at an exclusive RADA event in central London with the Ogden Trust. Someone had dropped out last minute and although I only found out on the day of the performance I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity. Once I’d arranged everything with my boyfriend so that he’d also got a ticket for the show (and I’d cheekily asked the Ogden Trust if it would be ok for him to tag along to the aftershow party with the cast) I left the lab early and travelled home as fast as I could to change and make myself ready for an evening of a very different kind of star spotting than I’m used to!

In the end we were a little late for the show (after a debacle with a ‘fast’ food restaurant) but my boyfriend and I had a lovely time (*special thank you to Isla*). Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was an amazing musical. The songs were very funny and the sets were wonderful (they had robots on stage for minutes that must have cost a lot of money to develop as well as intricate designs that fitted within a huge television used to introduce each child). I really enjoyed the show and I even spotted Richard Wilson during the interval in the RADA event room at the theatre (complete with drinks and posh canapés)!

The following day was my first as a volunteer on my supervisor’s stall at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. I didn’t know much about Cassini or JUICE before I started at the stand to be honest, but loved talking about comets when people asked the standard ‘so what you do you?’ question (I suppose they kind of count as icy worlds anyway…). I really enjoyed my time at the exhibit but was very tired by the time I came home again. I’d been enjoying myself so much I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t sat down all day!

On my second day of volunteering I was a bit more careful to take breaks and as I was sitting down quietly to enjoy my lunch my supervisor decided to take his. He then asked me what I was doing that evening. In hindsight this was definitely a leading question but I wasn’t prepared for it after my mad week so far so I said ‘nothing in particular’, and he asked whether I would like to do the Soiree that evening. The Soirees at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition are exclusive evening events with compulsory black tie dress codes (meaning cocktail dresses for women), copious amounts of champagne and lovely food. I couldn’t say no to that!

It was a bit strange trying to explain science in a cocktail dress (almost as though I was either a girl or a scientist but I’d never been both before). It was a good job my (only) cocktail dress happened to be clean and in my wardrobe at the time. I saw quite a lot of interesting people (including Robert Winston, although I’d already seen him before as he lectured my friend at Imperial) and even had a nice chat about Rosetta (and interior design!) with the Minister for Science. I was a bit nervous about going (although from some of the people I spoke to over dinner they quite enjoy scientists being nervous, so maybe that was the idea…) but luckily there was another PhD student volunteering at the same time so we helped each other out when we could.

So all in all: a completely crazy, royal week. By the time the weekend came I just wanted to curl up in bed and be thankful I’d survived it. However, a few weeks ago I’d arranged to see Mumford and Sons and Vampire Weekend with my brother at the ‘Gentlemen of the Road’ festival in the Olympic Park on Saturday so the madness wasn’t quite over yet!

Mumford and Sons Finale. Amazing!

Royal Treatment: Part 1

I promised I’d tell you about all the exciting things that have happened to me recently, so here’s a couple to get you started. I’ve been so busy lately but now I’m having a couple of weeks off with my boyfriend it seems like a suitable time to stop and take stock of everything that’s happened. Sometimes I'm so busy just getting on with things that I forget how amazing these opportunities are (especially if completely wear me out!).

Some weeks ago I helped my supervisor with the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibit he’d organised by sorting out a rota for the volunteers that fitted in with everyone’s schedule. This was supposed to be a relatively simple task that involved collating everyone’s information on when they were available from a google document that they’d filled in into a huge spreadsheet that ensured enough people were always on the stand. Perhaps this is showing my naivety but I really did think it would be that simple. I thought I’d finished the rota quite a few times but following several emails concerning child care, suit collection, ‘I know I said I’d do that originally but really I’d rather do this’ and a major mishap to do with finishing times it was eventually completed to everyone’s satisfaction.

The Royal Society is amazing. I’d never been there until this exhibition but I really should have made the effort to visit. The summer science exhibition runs every year and is open to the general public, with one day reserved exclusively for schools. Literally anyone can walk in from the street and have the most difficult and interesting subjects in modern science explained to them. It’s quite nerve wracking if you’re on a stand – you never know whether the person you’re talking to is a scientist or someone who’s only experience of science comes from their children’s homework. As a volunteer I had questions like ‘What is energy?’ and ‘How does the Sun make light?’ – and you have to be prepared to give some kind of answer, no matter how difficult the topic!

My supervisor’s stand was on the subject of Icy Worlds – focussing on the Cassini mission that is currently orbiting around Saturn and the newly approved JUICE mission that will investigate Jupiter and its moons. Cassini is coming to the end of its mission and is scheduled to be crashed into the surface of Saturn shortly to avoid unnecessary space debris, but it’s given us a lot of new science and many people (in my group at MSSL in particular) talk about Cassini as if it’s an old friend.

In contrast JUICE, the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (what people will do for a catchy name!), is the new kid on the block. It’s only recently been approved as an ESA mission, with instrument teams being selected from different universities. Not everyone got what they wanted in the first round so there was a mad dash for unsuccessful groups to collaborate with those that had won the round. It should be quite an interesting mission though as Jupiter is a very interesting system. It’s the biggest planet in the solar system, with its own huge magnetic field forming an extended magnetosphere that is the largest structure in our solar system. Jupiter’s huge gravitational pull has helped it to trap lots of interesting bodies in our solar system, and some of its moons are very unique. Four of Jupiter’s moons are so large that they could be seen by Galileo in 1610 and provided strong evidence for his sun-centric solar system - because if these moons didn’t orbit the Earth then maybe other objects didn’t have to either. One of the Galilean moons called Ganymede is the only moon in our solar system with its own magnetic field. No one really knows why this is at the moment – there shouldn’t be any activity in the core because it is relatively small and cold. Hopefully JUICE will shed some light on this.

Cassini made a big stir in the space physics community when it found plumes of water ice spewing out of the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, like huge space geysers. This implied a huge water-ocean just underneath the surface of the moon that was constantly coming up through cracks in the surface ice and recycling the surface.

We usually estimate how old a moon is by counting how many impact craters are on the surface, because the older the moon the higher the chance of another body colliding with it. However, if the moon’s surface is constantly being renewed then crater counting would be useless- so discovering the plume at Enceladus explained how it could be so much smoother than the other moons in the Jupiter system. There’s a very similar moon in Jupiter’s system with a very smooth surface called Europa, so maybe JUICE will discover similar features to Enceladus or maybe something different is going on. No one really knows and we can’t sit in our offices thinking about it – something/someone has to go and have a look! That’s why I love space physics. 

Moons of the Solar Solar System to Scale (Image from NASA's website). If this is a bit small for you then try this link:  http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/multimedia/display.cfm?IM_ID=2823

Out Of Probation

A lot has happened since I last wrote, but let’s start at the beginning! Not so long ago I handed in my probation report. Once it was done my time wasn’t exactly my own, as I had to prepare for various events (I’ll be telling you all about those in future blogs I promise), so even when it was done I didn’t get much chance to work on my sodium tail model (that I really need to get on with for my PhD!).

The next official thing after completing the probation report is to have a meeting with your panel to discuss the report and how things are going in general. My first panel meeting didn’t seem to be so intimidating ,as I wasn’t expecting to have achieved much by this time (although it was rather a long time ago), but now I’ve been doing my PhD for about a year I felt like I had more to prove. My panel are absolutely lovely, so I wasn’t too scared but I still made sure to prepare for the meeting so I definitely understood the basics. Some of my report was quite complicated as I’d thoroughly reviewed the literature on my subject – including going back to the first detection of sodium emission in comets in 1881 and subsequently the first papers from the 1920’s that proved comets weren’t self-luminous (i.e. the light you saw at comets was just reflected sunlight).

This might all have been a little off topic but I’d been feeling a bit guilty that I’d spent most of my first 9 months learning to make IDL (a programming language) work for me, so I thought I’d better make up for my lack of reading. To be honest I didn’t really know what to put in my report, but most of the time I don’t really know what I’m doing for my PhD in general so I suppose I shouldn’t have expected to. I keep asking my supervisor for some direction, which he does give, but mostly it’s my ideas he wants and for me to get on with implementing them. Every so often I’ll ask ‘do you think it would be a good idea if…’ and the general answer is ‘yes, do that’. I can’t really believe how much he trusts me to make decisions!

Once I’d thoroughly reviewed the literature I felt a bit better about my PhD but I did start to think that I hadn’t done enough of my own actual work (you know… new research). I’d done quite a bit of programming but not had much opportunity to analyse my results (other than ‘that looks ok’ and ‘no, that’s definitely a load of rubbish’). I’d asked my panel meeting chair what she wanted me to include in my presentation about my report (to be given at the panel meeting) and she said she wasn’t that interested in what other people had done, except as context for my work. I’d been giving a lot of presentations lately, helping my supervisor with outreach things and applying for funding to go to a conference in December in San Francisco - so I’d felt like my actual work had kind of taken a back-seat to all of this stuff that I saw as PhD administration.

My closest friend from the lab had been very ill and gone home to recover, so I hadn’t had anyone to rant to lately, apart from my long suffering boyfriend. UCL is a wonderful university to study at but every so often a new scheme will come in at any university (or business I imagine) that will change everything and make everyone uncomfortable for a while. Recently this had taken the form of the deadlines being changed for PhD students at MSSL, to try to make sure that students finish their PhD’s on time. Instead of having to complete 3 chapters of your thesis for your upgrade panel at 18 months, we were now going to have to do exactly the same thing by 13 months (just to a lower quality,  whatever that means...). I’m not entirely sure why universities are so worried about students not finishing on time. If I haven’t finished my PhD by time my funding runs out I’ll have to get a job - they won’t have to worry about me cluttering up the lab!

I brought all of these worries up in my panel meeting. My chair was really nice about it. She said it would take some time to get the balance right between my research and all the other things you need to get used to in the world of work. I’m starting to understand that most PhD students struggle with these issues and not feeling alone really helps. My panel seemed to think my report was pretty good though (better than they expected from someone at my stage of a PhD) – so I must be doing something right!

Undergraduate Days Part 2

Feeling old again this week… another story from my undergraduate days…

2) Auroral Opportunity

I've always wanted to see the Aurora (Borealis or Australis). I've seen pictures of course, and videos, but when I was in my first year at university I got the chance to go to Kiruna in Northern Sweden to see it for myself. The course was run by Umea University and was called ‘Arctic Science’. It promised to cover topics as varied as the Physics of Snow, the Aurora and climate change and also included a visit to the Ice Hotel. I jumped at it! Once I’d got the money together (the course was free but you had to pay for your own accommodation and food while you were there) and worked out that it was going to be possible for me to fit the trip in (it wasn’t part of my degree at Imperial but luckily it fell on the last week of the Christmas holidays) I sent off my application and was lucky enough to be accepted.

For those of you that don’t know about the aurora here’s a really brief outline of the physics: particles blow out of the sun on a magnetic field all the time (the solar wind). Often these particles travel towards Earth but usually our magnetic field protects us from them. On some occasions the magnetic field in the solar wind joins up with the Earth’s magnetic field (called reconnection). The particles in the solar wind can then travel down the Earth’s magnetic field lines (most easily at the north and south poles) and hit the atmosphere. This ionises and excites particles in the Earth’s atmosphere and makes them emit the light that we see as the aurora. The different colours come from different elements in the atmosphere being ionised – mainly red/green for Oxygen and blue for Nitrogen. You can also see aurorae from space on Earth and on other planets with a magnetic field (e.g. Saturn). Studying aurora tells you a lot about which charged particles you have in your system (for example you can spot footprints of the moons of Saturn in the planet’s aurora).

The Arctic Science course was amazing. At that point I’d never been on an aeroplane by myself, I’d never been north of Scotland and I’d never been on a sleeper train (which turned out to be the easiest way to get to Kiruna from Stockholm, where you can easily get an international flight) so the whole experience of getting to the Arctic Circle was completely daunting. I also didn’t speak Swedish (except hello, sorry, please and thank you) but everyone was so kind and I was lucky enough to bump into a retired Swedish-English teacher on my journey, who showed me which platform to wait on.

The whole trip was really memorable. We went to Ice Hotel- a hotel/huge artwork that has to be rebuilt every winter because it melts in the summer months. Thousands of artists craft beautiful beds, statues, archways and even a wedding chapel made entirely of ice! We also got to go dog sledding in the evening, which was definitely my favourite part of the trip. It was so cold we had to wear full body suits and balaclavas that iced up as you breathed. The tour was over a frozen lake and you could hear the ice cracking as the sled went over it. We stopped half way around to warm our hands by a fire, rest the dogs and eat Reindeer meat.

The science was interesting too. We learnt lots about the different structures in the Aurora and other arctic phenomena, including Noctilucent clouds (the highest clouds on Earth) and Sun Dogs (phantom Sun’s created when the atmosphere acts like a lens). We still don’t know a lot about how mechanisms that generate the aurora and lots of research is looking into the physics responsible for the finer detail. We also had an interesting debate about climate change that turned into quite an enthusiastic argument, as we had a couple of sceptics in our group. I also found it interesting to learn about the growth of ice crystals. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the aurora, as I went when solar activity was very low (solar minimum) so no reconnection occurred.

When I came back I was thrown straight into my first round of university level exams! Over the next month I finished off the remaining coursework and gained my 4.5ECTS points for the Arctic Science course (only valid on the European university system – but I still wanted to finish the course). In the end I passed the course and was left with happy memories of my time in the Arctic Circle, a pair of fetching fluffy snow-boots and a bright orange snow jacket. As far as I know the course is still running so if this is something you’re interested in it is definitely worth a look (http://www.irf.se/~carol/winter/). In 2013/2014 we’ll probably be roughly at a peak in the solar cycle so you should have a much better chance than I did of seeing the Aurora, but I’m not making any promises!

My view from the dog sled

Undergraduate Days Part 1

I recently got back in touch with a friend that I haven't seen since high school (the wonders of Facebook...) and we've been catching up. She's had a tough time since we left school, but then again I suppose we've all struggled a bit to find where we want to be in life. I was educated at a state high school just outside Manchester from 11-16 and to be honest it wasn't the best experience. Most of the staff was great and I got particularly involved in lots of music activities (choir, band etc.) but the area was pretty poor and most people didn't think they'd get very far in life. My friends seem to have done pretty well for themselves (becoming police officers, chefs and university graduates) but the thought of doing a PhD was so far from our minds during high school that we didn't even think about it long enough to think that it wasn't really a possibility. I've always love Physics so I've just sort of carried on with it. I used to think someone would stop me one day and say 'this isn't really for you' but they haven't yet so I'll just keep enjoying myself.

With all the meandering down memory lane I've been reminiscing university stories to catch my high school friend up, so I thought I'd share a few with you. So here you are: two snapshots of the best and worst times I had a university. I’ll start with the more dramatic (and therefore the best story to my mind) but my next post will be a lot more cheery I promise. If you have a favourite story from your time at university why not leave a comment...

1) Snow/Ice Balls

Equipped for real snow in
Kiruna, Sweden.

It's 5pm on Friday afternoon on the last day of term before the Christmas holidays, and I'm in a lecture theatre. We've been waiting around for the past hour for this particular gem of a lecture and half my year has decided to go to the union bar during this time. It's been snowing for the last couple of days and no one (not even the lecturer) wants to be here. The rest of the department have gone home – it’s just me, my (slightly drunk) year group and a very bored (very new) lecturer. All I want to do is get all the notes written down (I’m far to tired to actually take anything into my brain at this point) but my year has other ideas. Some of the students sat at the back of the lecture theatre have brought some snow in with them. They then decide it would be a really good idea to throw snowballs at those students sat at the front of the lecture theatre. Now I’m sure this was all done as a joke, and if we were all outside I wouldn’t have minded. I admit I was in a bit of a bad mood because I just didn’t want to be there anyway, but honestly I’m not usually that dull.

The fact is I was sat in a lecture theatre with all my carefully handwritten notes and fat, wet snow/ice balls were landing all around me. My notes were getting wet and the ink was starting to run. The throwers were of course careful only to do it when the lecturers back was turned, which wasn’t difficult as he spent most of the lecture writing on the blackboard, but I couldn’t stand it any more. With my blood boiling I stood up in front of the 100 or so people in the lecture theatre, apologised to the lecturer and turning to the culprits sat on the back row said loudly, ‘Get out please’. To this day I do not know why I chose those words - it really doesn't make sense. An odd mixture between rage and antiquated politeness.

The people on the back row seemed amused. I explained what was going on to the lecturer and he tried to reason with the guilty parties so we could all just finish the lecture and get out of there. I tried to reason with the people sat around me – they were all just as annoyed but hadn’t said anything. A couple of people stood up and agreed with me but everyone else got a little bit lower in their seats. When the lecturer continued with his material the snowballs resumed, but this time they were aimed squarely at me. There was only ten minutes left so I pulled my coat around myself and my work and resolved to get out of there as quickly as possible.

After the lecture my friend told me I was stupid for making myself (and her – she was sat next to me and their aim wasn't that great) a target. Others said well done, they were glad someone had said something – even if it didn’t make much difference. My notes were just about readable, but I did have to write them out again without the water stains to stop myself getting angry when I was revising. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere, but please don't think I'm still bitter about it now. I just like a good story.

How to get a PhD: Part 2

A few more things every applicant should know about the PhD process…

Usually a university offers a range of PhD's in different subjects but don't be fooled into thinking they can afford all of them. Usually a large group can manage 2, 3 or 4 fully funded PhD places per year (depending on their previous successes) so if they don't have good enough candidates they don't make offers. Also, don't be afraid to ask for a different PhD topic if you're interested and know your potential supervisors have the relevant experience- my PhD wasn't offered on the website. You shouldn't be afraid to ask your Masters supervisors for help with finding out what's on offer either and if they put in a good word for you at the same time - all the better!

Once you've decided what you want to do and where you want to do it you have to fill in your application. It's usually a good idea to do this over the Christmas holidays of the year you intend to start your PhD the following September/October. It's worth taking a bit of time to fill in the application form properly, but mostly you need to worry that your CV is up to date and your personal statement highlights your enthusiasm for your subject as well as proof that you have the required skills to complete a PhD. You know the kind of thing: teamwork, time management etc. but try and tailor it to match specific skills you will need for the PhD you are applying for e.g. experience of relevant programming languages. You will also need references for your application, so make sure you have good relationships with some academics at your current university so your potential employer knows you can happily work with other people. You can get 100% in your Masters degree but if you can’t work well with others no one will offer you a PhD.

You've submitted your application and they've called you for an interview. Congratulations! Typically a panel of your potential supervisors and an external member of staff (who will check your general scientific ability) will interview you. Expect to discuss your Masters project in detail and prove you have some idea about what you intend for your future career. There are no right answers here. Usually saying 'I want to be a professor' will just make you come across as naive if you're not passionate about it, as most PhD students don't go on to be academics.

I’ve always found interviews to be a bit nerve-wracking, but it’s very important to meet your potential employer and find out where you would be working. Try not to forget that you're interviewing them too. You need to make sure you'll be able to work with your potential supervisors and that you feel comfortable working in your chosen lab/office. I’ve heard stories of interviews where the candidates have been treated so badly those that have offered the place haven’t accepted it – and so have your interviewers!  If they want you to work for them (and don’t want someone willing to work themselves into an early grave – which should definitely not be you!) they will be understanding and make you feel welcome. That said, don’t expect that they won’t ask you any difficult questions – they will. You won’t know the answers sometimes – this is allowed. In the case of a PhD interview they are usually checking that you’re ok with not knowing the answers, as this is what a PhD is all about. You will spend a lot of your time not knowing the answer to some burning question and you’d better be ok with that!

You've been offered a PhD! Wow! Oh. Now you've been offered another one. They both want you to make a decision. Oh dear - didn't think of that. Whatever your reasons and whatever your decision be sure you don't leave it too long. Typically you get a few weeks to decide but while your feeling pleased with yourself someone else is waiting to hear whether they've got a place or not.

Apologies to those of you who know all this already - I just always wished that someone had told me before I got involved in all of this!

How to get a PhD: Part 1

Talk at this time of year always seems to turn to what you're going to do next. It's a bit late to be applying for a funded PhD place now but I thought you might like to know the kind of thing to expect if you choose to apply.

Interviews are all finished at MSSL now for the fully funded places. I don't know how it works for other subjects but this is how it worked for science when I applied. It's probably a bit different now but the same principles apply.

First of all you need a Masters (MSc or MSci) to do a PhD in the UK. This can be a bit tricky if your university only offers the Bachelors and you're a UK student, as you can't get a student loan for a stand alone Masters course (that's why most people choose to do an integrated Masters (MSci)). There's one caveat now that you can get on a DTC (Doctoral Training Centre) course, which is kind of a Masters tacked onto a PhD. It has the advantage that you effectively get paid to do the Masters, but they're aren't DTC's in every subject as they tend to be linked to a specific industry. Currently there is no DTC in space physics so this wasn't really an option for me. If you like simulating materials, condensed matter or plastic electronics this might be the best decision for you.

That's the complicated part over. Stay with me...

If you're on target for a 80% in your Master's degree you can expect to get snapped up quickly for a funded PhD with a research council, assuming you can get on with your potential supervisor. That means they will pay both your living costs to you (called a Stipend) and your fees directly to your university. Let me be completely clear here - this is not a loan, you will not have to pay it back! :)

If you're on target for 70% in your Masters you can expect to get an interview for your PhD and fight your corner a little but if you show enough promise you can expect to get a fully funded place. At 60% you'll find it a bit harder. 60% is the cutoff for a fully funded place and most universities won't give you a PhD if you might not make the grade. Less than 60% and you don't meet the  criteria to get a fully funded PhD place so unless you can afford to pay for the PhD yourself (or pay for another Masters (to get a higher grade)) you should probably look at something else. To be honest if you get less than 60% you will probably not enjoy completing a PhD. You have to be sure it's what you want to do - three years is a long time to do a PhD if it makes you miserable.

Once you've got the right qualifications you need to decide where to apply. If you have a specific topic in mind for your PhD you will need to find which university departments have published papers in this field recently. Bear in mind that there is no such thing as a 'general PhD'. If you can't choose one topic you will be happy to look at for the next three years then this probably isn't for you. Also, don't be swayed by the reputation of the university, it's the reputation of your potential supervisor that's important. The experience you have as a PhD student in my experience depends entirely on your supervisor but again there are a few things to consider. If you choose a senior member of the department you will probably find it very difficult to get close supervision but they'll have more contacts in your field, more experience and more credibility. On the other hand if your supervisor is new to the job they will probably have more time for you, but if they're still trying to prove themselves to their supervisors so the situation can get a little tricky for you.

To be continued…

Comic book strip from www.phdcomics.com

On Probation

Before I stress the Ogden Trust out too much let me first say that I haven't been arrested, this post isn't about that kind of probation. When you are given a PhD place funded by a research council (STFC in my case) they don't agree to fund you for three years straight away. Your first year is a 'probationary period' where you are expected to prove that you have the ability to produce useful research and can finish your PhD in a timely fashion. You work for the PhD but if your performance is unsatisfactory in your first year there are procedures in place to allow you to graduate at the end of your first year with just an MPhil (Master of Philosophy) qualification. No pressure!

Most universities have procedures in place so that you aren't left confused for a long periods of time with no formal meeting to allow you to raise your concerns. For MSSL this takes place in a series of panel meetings (as I've already talked about a little in a previous post). My next panel meeting is one of the most serious. At it I have to present the work I've done so far and make the case for continuing on my PhD.

I have been very stressed for the past couple of weeks at MSSL because I've been working on my 9 month probation report that has to be handed in before this meeting. In the meeting I will have to give a short presentation based around the topics covered in my report. Then there will be a general discussion about my progress and how I feel everything is going. The report is due in exactly a month but I'd started early as I really wanted to impress. 

My code is bug free now so while it's running I have lots of time for reading papers and writing insightful narratives about the history of my field. That was the idea. In reality the writing of my 'Magnum Opus' has so far involved my staring blankly at computer screens and incomprehensible scientific gibberish. I understand my field. I think. Just don't ask me to explain anything because I'll say that I don't really understand it all that well - by which i mean that I don't yet understand it better than my supervisor or all the other people that have been working on this stuff for longer than I've been alive. It's very difficult to be so inexperienced sometimes. I'm trying to be intelligent! It's just that my brain translates everything into ideas that I can understand and when I write that down it only sounds vaguely scientific and definitely not impressive. 

I have to keep reminding myself that this is not my thesis. I have an awful lot to say but it is not physically possible to fit everything I know about comets (science-y or not) into 10-20 pages, which is all I'm allowed for this specific piece of work.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome, from my parents holiday photos.
So jealous!

On top of all this stressing my car broke down last week. It only had a flat tyre but I had no idea how to change it for the spare in the boot. My very kind office-mate helped me change it (by which i mean he did most of the hard work and I stood by looking helpless and apologising) but then I had no idea where to get a new tyre or how to get it fitted. I didn't even have a clue how much a tyre should cost (usually between £50-£80 for a reasonably good one for those equally clueless)! I'm ashamed to say that usually my Dad takes care of all these things, but with him being on holiday in Italy for two weeks there wasn't much chance of my contacting him. There also wasn't much point in my calling my usual family garage - as it is 300 miles away! My boyfriend is less than helpful when it comes to anything to do with the car - partly because he's a very 'theoretical' physicist and partly because he's only just started taking driving lessons again, so I was pretty much on my own. In the end I found a garage that would fit a tyre for me. The guy was so nice and made sure that I oil and water were OK too before he let me drive off. I have no idea whether he did a good job or not but the car goes quite happily now and the tyre hasn't yet fell off! I'll keep you posted!

Wish me luck with my probation report! I think I'll be tacking this particular beast for quite a while now... of course rumours abound that some in my year have already finished it!

The Magic of Science

Me outside the entrance...

Last Friday was my 23rd birthday. To celebrate the week before I went to visit the Harry Potter Studio tour, just outside London. My boyfriend had bought the tickets for Christmas but we'd been so busy that this was the first weekend we could comfortably fit it in.

I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I read all the books when they first came out and dragged either my boyfriend or my family to watch all of the films. I always felt like I kind of grew up with the characters, as they were always about my age when the books came out. I'm a bit of a geek - you might have noticed. Only when it comes to Harry Potter, Stargate, Firefly and Star Trek. That felt like a confession! Moving on…

Real slithering snake door (they
wouldn't let me press the button :( )

The Harry Potter studio tour was amazing. You get to go around lots of different sets and see how they made everything look so real. The biggest surprise for me was that most of it was real. A lot of the props look so amazing because instead of being designed on a computer they'd taken the time, effort and money to actually make the movements you'd expect. For example in one of the sets (The Weasley's kitchen for fellow nerds) there is a pot and scrubbing brush in the sink that washes itself. In the tour you can press a button to make it work. It’s all done with electric motors and clever counterweight systems! They’d also taken the trouble to hand make hundreds of prophesy orbs and that were never used in the end because they decided the computer generated graphics were better. The things you can do if you have enough money! The slithering snake door in the chamber of secrets and the magic door at Gringots that clicks open with a thousand tiny levers were both real too. The crew had actually taken the time to work out how to build each intricate piece and then fit it together so carefully that every cog and lever clicked seamlessly into place. The Goblet of Fire was also carved from a single piece of wood!

Of course a lot of what was seen in the movies was computer generated, using clever tricks like green/blue screens and false perspectives to fool our senses. Our world obeys physical laws so all computer generate graphics have to as well to be able to trick our eyes.

Huge animatronic spider
that took over 100 people to operate!

Put the fact that people can’t fly riding around on broomsticks to one side for the moment. If Harry Potter was whizzing around and flew to the left while his cloak flew to the right you wouldn’t believe it, because the centrifugal force* you know and love doesn’t work like that. Maybe he had a magic cloak that makes the centrifugal force acting on it result in a ‘magic force’ that acts in the opposite direction, but somehow this seems more unbelievable than the broomstick-flying in the first place.

Basically film makers have to be very careful about not breaking the laws of physics when they are creating even fantastical worlds, so they use clever computational 'physics engines' to keep track of things like gravity and centrifugal force.

The week after we went the royal visit took place and the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour London was opened officially. I would highly recommend it to any Harry Potter fans or fans of the magic of cinema in general, but if you get to go just remember: all magic is just clever scientific trickery!

Animatronic Buckbeak (he actually bowed!)

*Centrifugal force is a real force. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It is a consequence of your sitting in a moving reference frame so technically is a pseudo-force, but so is magnetism and you wouldn’t say that didn’t exist would you? A magnetic field is caused by the motion of electrically charged particles. That’s why you can’t have a magnetic monopole in a normal situation because if charges move from one place to another they can’t disappear.

My First PhD talk

On Friday I gave the first professional talk of my PhD. I'd been worrying about it for quite a while, especially as I thought it was rather early in my PhD to be presenting my research. My boyfriend is half way through his second year and he still hasn't given a professional talk yet. I suppose it depends on what kind of research you're doing. He has spent most of his time so far developing code so he is only just starting to get results that he can present.

My first talk was to be given at the RAS (Royal Astronomical Society). My supervisor had persuaded me to do it, as he was organizing the meeting and wanted to present the work of some of his students. It would be my first chance to meet the members of the cometary physics community in the UK and I was anxious to make the right impression.

The RAS's crest, it reads 'Whatever
shines should be observed'

The week leading up to the meeting I was very worried. My supervisor was at a conference in Germany and although he had seen the slides for the first draft of my presentation, he hadn't had time to run through it with me. The day before I was due to give the talk my office mate persuaded me to present it to some of the other students at the lab (and then persuaded them to listen to it).

I'm usually quite shy but for some reason when I have to give a presentation I get overwhelmed with nervous energy. It probably means I'm in the right line of work. I have lots of ideas and lots of enthusiasm but if I don't direct it carefully I can end up in an explanation cul-de-sac. Luckily this nervous energy had kicked in a day early and when I gave my talk to the other students it didn't seem like a complete disaster. I did talk too fast (I always seem to during presentations) and I'm sure I did a thousand other things wrong, but they understood what I was trying to say and I was pleased with their feedback. It's certainly a lot less intimidating to practice with a group of your fellow students than with more senior members of academic staff.

The evening before the meeting I went to the cinema with my boyfriend to watch the new version of Les Miserables. I never liked waiting in the night before an exam (and to be honest it felt like an exam, I had visions of people interrupting me in the middle of my presentation with phrases like 'well that's not quite right now is it???'), so I decided to be proactive. The film was pretty good and turned out to be an excellent distraction.

The WHT, part of the ING
at La Palma

The morning of the meeting I couldn't eat anything and was thoroughly getting on my boyfriend's nerves verbalizing all of my worries. I'd arranged to meet my supervisor and his other PhD student at the RAS an hour before the meeting was due to start. My supervisor's other PhD student was 2 years into his studies before he left to work on/play with telescopes at the Isaac Newton Group (ING) based in La Palma, Canary Islands. He was just as nervous as me, even though it was his second time giving a presentation at the RAS - possibly because he didn't seem to think the first one had gone well.

The meeting was organised to facilitate discussion of the science of near-Sun comets. Prior to the discussion I had assumed that near-Sun comets would naturally be the brightest comets observable (as it's the Sun's radiation that causes comet tails, and if you're closer to the Sun there's a lot more radiation). In reality many near-Sun comets are so small that they are very difficult to detect, and consequently fail to survive their precarious trip through the Sun's atmosphere. I found all the talks very interesting and greatly enjoyed seeing the other aspects of cometary science being studied. Everyone seemed very excited about the next big comet: ISON. Predicted to reach perihelion (the closest approach to the Sun) around Christmas 2013, it had been suggested (rather tentatively, as comets tend to be very unpredictable) that ISON will be a very bright comet and provide scientists with both interesting data and an opportunity to get the general public involved.

The RAS meeting room - this was full when
I presented my work from the podium!

When it came time for me to present my talk I was very nervous. I had practiced my opening lines several times to make sure I didn't miss out anything, for instance that I was a first year (please be nice to me...) and that I'd got a lot of my images from my supervisor's collaborators. Once I'd started it didn't seem so bad and to be honest I can't remember a lot of what I said. I don't think I came across as very professional but all the cometary people were very encouraging. I think I just need more practice, especially in a professional setting (the RAS's HUGE projector screen was very intimidating when I stood next to it - it was about 3 times my height).  I got lots of nice questions after I'd presented (they were really interested in my research!), and everyone from my group at MSSL said that I'd done well.

After the discussion I went for dinner with my boyfriend, my supervisor and some of the speakers from the meeting. I soon found myself laughing and discussing the merits of Japanese food with the very people I'd found so intimidating two hours before. So, although I was very worried about the whole meeting/discussion/dinner I had rather a nice time. Not Les Miserables at all...

Panel Meetings

It's been a while since I wrote last. Hopefully this post will explain why, at least in part. Before I start I just want to say a big thank you to Isla and everyone at the Ogden trust for a lovely lunch and of course my shiny new toy, which I am now writing this post on.

So what have I been up to all this time? Well, at MSSL they have a very important system in place to make sure all PhD students are progressing as they should be: panel meetings. Basically if anything is going wrong with your PhD - everything from you not doing enough work to your supervisor not being around enough- this is the way it gets sorted out. It's a great system that will hopefully mean that I finish my PhD before my funding runs out, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't very very nervous for my first panel meeting.

My Beautiful Simulated Comet

At the start of your PhD you're supposed to be mainly reading around your subject area and learning to understand the language used (yes, technically all the papers are in English but most of the time it doesn't feel like it, especially when everything is new). However, as I knew the basics of space physics from my undergraduate degree I'd been spending most of my time learning my supervisor's chosen programming language (IDL) and making it produce beautiful plots (apparently saying 'graphs' isn't science-y enough any more). Well, they're beautiful to me anyway, but they can still elicit an 'ooo' from my office-mate so I figure I'm winning so far. Anyway, because of my pedestrian programming (not a bad thing - computers are very stupid) I hadn't done as much reading as I would have liked and in general felt that I wasn't prepared enough for this first meeting.

The basic outline of a panel meeting at MSSL is as follows. First the chair (the lead speaker at the meeting for those not into business speak- even scientists have to do it nowadays I'm afraid) talks about the purpose of the meeting and asks you and your supervisors how things are going in general. Then it's your turn. The student gives a presentation on the work that they have done so far and afterwards is questioned about any points that the chair thinks were unclear. If you have kind supervisors like I do, when you get stuck on an question they try and help you out. When that's over your supervisors have to leave so you can say terrible things about them confidentially to your chair. Unfortunately mine are lovely so I didn't get to do any of that. (I think it probably shows how uncomfortable I still am with this business-speak that I am now picturing myself standing up and talking to my chair directly. Never mind...) Finally you have to leave while they discuss your progress.

There aren't many people in the meeting, only your primary and secondary supervisors, someone to take minutes and the chair, who has to be someone outside your group. As I'm writing this my secondary supervisor has just appeared on the news talking about the new manned mission to Mars. It sounds really interesting. My secondary supervisor is the head of my group and is always pushing for us to raise the profile of the department. I suppose that's what he means.

Anyway, back to the panel meeting. Although the first meeting is supposed to be very informal, most of the first year students had started seriously worrying about it. Somehow being told many times that you have nothing to worry about has never managed to fill me with confidence. How you are supervised depends very much on who your supervisor is, and before my first panel meeting I'd heard a very worrying story about a first year being grilled so badly during her meeting that she'd had to spend the rest of the day in another meeting with her supervisor to sort everything out. The other first year PhD student in my group had gone through her presentation with her supervisor a few times and had managed to make me even more worried about mine!

My new office name plate. To be a physicist you have to have
a well developed sense of humour...

In the end everything went ok. I stumbled over a few of my explanations but I think they were impressed with everything I'd managed to achieve so far. My supervisor dropped me in it a bit asking me to show plots that I hadn't prepared (because I didn't think we're ready to be shown), but I suppose I've given them something to look forward to next time. I'd only shown them to him because I was making them when he came to my office (it's got my name on the door and everything!).

Hot and Cold

A very snowy Natural History Museum

I like snow. It makes everything look clean and reminds me that nature is definitely more in charge of our lives than we would like to admit. That being said- snow is a real pain when you actually have to go out and do something useful. Having spent most of the past week in bed with the flu by Friday I was determined to go outside and talk to someone that wasn't my long-suffering boyfriend. In my case this meant going to the UK Planetary Forum’s 10th Earth Career Planetary Scientist’s Meeting (yes… I know that’s a bit of a mouthful) at the Natural History Museum in central London. Having arranged to meet a friend from work outside the entrance and with my mother’s nagging voice in my head (i.e. wearing a woolly hat, scarf, gloves, jumper, coat and making my boyfriend wear much of the same – including his cowboy hat as he couldn’t find his umbrella and his coat doesn’t have a hood) I set off with my boyfriend for central London. He is currently doing his PhD at Imperial College London, which is just around the corner from the Natural History Museum.

I got to the Natural History Museum eventually, but central London is a long way from MSSL. In fact pretty much everything is a long way from MSSL, which can and does come as a bit of a shock to most people who actually try to get there (thinking it’s part of University College LONDON so it must be IN London). MSSL is basically at the top of a big hill in the middle of the Surrey countryside. It’s a very friendly community to work in, probably in part due to its isolation (you’ve got to stick together if it’s just you and the werewolves/vampires/zombies – it can feel like the ‘Silent Hill’ computer game on a foggy winter evening). The site has flats available for first year PhD students and its own very helpful driver, who had arrived at the student flats early on Friday morning and told my friend not to bother coming into London as she probably wouldn’t be able to get home again.

I suppose I should just say now that I’m naturally very cautious around new people. I know networking is something I really need to work on if I want a career in science. My boyfriend got a placement in an American research lab last summer, just because he happened to talk to the right person at a conference. Ok, so the whole process of his getting there (and my getting an amazing holiday in San Francisco because of it!) was a lot more complicated that but you get the picture- talking to people at conferences (and not just sitting quietly with the people you came with) is very important. Still, I’m only a first year and I have to keep reminding myself that if I knew how to do all this stuff already I would not be doing a PhD.

Holding pieces of an asteroid

So here I am, sitting quietly (not with the people I came with because I didn’t come with anyone – is that worse?), listening to interesting talks from space physics PhD students from all over the country. Most students seemed to be working on something to do with Mars, Saturn or Jupiter in line with the current missions currently proposed/active. My supervisor and lots of other people from MSSL spent a long time before Christmas working on MSSL’s contribution to JUICE (the ESA led mission to Jupiter and its moons) and studies of the Jupiter system seem likely to be the next big thing in space physics. No one else was looking at comets. This is a little disheartening but there is a meeting about comets at the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in March so hopefully I’ll get to meet the whole cometary community then (and hopefully we won’t all fit in one meeting room…). In a way it’s good that not many people are looking at my subject area as it means that I can look at lots of different aspects of cometary science without worrying too much about treading on other people’s toes. You have to be very careful about this in planetary science. In general everyone gets the same data from space missions so the planetary science community has to sit down and decide which aspect each individual is going to look at. If your research is not original it won’t get published and you could lose your funding.

Asteroid Capture

One interesting talk was about finding planets around other stars, called Exoplanets. This science is in its infancy because you need very expensive equipment and complicated techniques to be able to detect the minute changes to the brightness of a host star caused by an orbiting planet. The bigger the Exoplanet, and the closer it is to its parent star, the larger the effect on the brightness of the star and so unsurprisingly most detections have been of large planets very close to their host star. For this reason they are often called ‘Hot Jupiters’. The talk was about trying to model what kind of environment might be present on one of these planets, but as it is very different to anything we could encounter in our own solar system we’ll probably never be able to achieve this unless we actually send missions outside our solar system and investigate. This might sound ludicrous but as I heard a talk just before Christmas on how to collect a WHOLE asteroid and put it in a stable position in the Earth-Moon system (so we can have it at our beck and call to practice space mining), I was willing to keep an open mind. These ideas probably are ludicrous, but people are still interested in doing them anyway. How wonderful is that?!