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!).