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!