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!