Life update
...and it's a pretty important one, which has already come up in conversation with a lot of people, but here's the short version: as of the beginning of this month, I'm back at university to start work on a PhD.
The whole story goes back quite a way longer: as many of you would have gathered by now, I've long had this problem where I hated my job. There are assorted reasons, starting with the basic problem that what the firm I was working for calls 'environmental engineering' they would have been better off hiring a civil engineer to do, continuing with the general problem that pretty much any job which involves trying to make the mining industry spend money on anything worthwhile is like beating your head against a brick wall, and ending with the ongoing frustration of how most of the rest of the people in the office I've been working in are, while not fundamentally evil in all respects, still the kind of guys who think jokes about how women should stay home and cook all their meals never get old, and that the suggestion that global warming was invented purely by scientists for a research grant is incredibly witty and insightful, even when they've just brought it up for the third time in two months and all laughed about it like they've never heard it before. Then there's my boss, about whom I've said enough in previous posts. Needless to say, I've been in the market for a new job for a good long while.
Finding one has been more of a problem. I was being picky, on the basis of wanting to be sure that I'd be doing something I'd enjoy next time, but the application process developed into a discouraging pattern: Apply for job. Get promising response. Get called in for interview, which goes well, and get assured they'll get back to me within a week or two at most. Wait a week or two, phone up, get told there's been an innocent delay and they're still making up their minds. Wait another week or two and do the same again. Finally get in contact with them to learn that they're so sorry to have kept me hanging but they've decided I'm not quite what they're looking for, or possibly that everything's fallen through and they've decided they're not actually hiring anyone at all. Lather, rinse, repeat.
On the other hand, I'm one of those crazy people who actually really enjoyed her university degree. I went through my last couple of years with a great group of people, got to take a lot of units and be involved with a couple of projects that were genuinely interesting to me, and had my final year thesis supervisors trying quite hard to convince me to come back and do a PhD by the end of it. At the time, the overwhelming feeling I had was that no matter how much I liked uni, I'd been there five years already and it was high time to go do something that wouldn't involve committing to another three years there. Now, however, with a few years of well-paid experience in how much life outside university can suck, and rapidly coming to the realisation that all the interesting jobs out there that hadn't rejected me already required higher academic qualifications, things looked a whole lot different. So I called up my old supervisors to say I was maybe-sorta-thinking about perhaps considering the possibility of maybe coming back and doing a PhD, to which they responded just as encouragingly as before. Except that I hadn't picked the ideal time to raise the subject - there were months to go before the next round of scholarships would become available, but hey, at least that gave me lots of time to think about topics and make up my mind. Work continued to suck in the interim. The universe continued to fail to supply me with any better employment.
Then I got an email to say there was a mid year scholarship round going for people who wanted to start before the end of the year, and it closed in a couple of weeks, and would I be interested? Hell yes. The application was intimidatingly formal and required a couple of paragraphs summarising that topic I didn't have figured out yet. I was assured 1) this was absolutely essential for the application process, and 2) this did not actually have to be the topic I eventually wound up doing, and a dummy topic courtesy of my supervisor would do quite well enough. The important things are that I made the deadline, that news that I'd gotten the scholarship came back a couple of weeks before I left for Melbourne and hinged on the requirement I started a week after getting back from Japan. That, in a nutshell, is why so little on the subject has been said around here until now.
Showing up on the first day was a bit of a harrowing experience. I am still convinced it must have been some kind of miracle that when I got there there was anyone around who had any idea who I was or what I was doing there at all, or that one conversation with my supervisor was all it took to give me at least the comforting illusion the topic I'd been toying with so far was not only workable but made a lot of sense. Details have yet to be hashed out (a state likely to be maintained to some degree for at least the next two and half years) but it's similar to my original final year thesis topic, so at least I'm in familiar territory. To save you all the bother of asking, it's going to be on using wireless sensor networks to study microclimate parameters... and I can already see eyes glazing over at the back there, so suffice to say it sounds good to me.
I'm still waiting for it to dawn on me exactly what I've gotten into. I wasn't initially reluctant to commit to three years on a single project like this without reason, and I won't know until December until whether I've got one of the higher value scholarships which are enough to actually live on without undue stress. I am quite aware I'm likely to start twitching at the mere mention of my thesis within a year of now. And yet... I like being back at the university. It's a nice place to work, in a department full of people who mostly remember me from my student days and whom I mostly remember fondly, and who share a lot of my general philosophies about the world being a place worth taking an interest in. And damn but it's nice having something to work on that feels like it could go somewhere interesting, no matter how much work that might take me - especially as opposed to turning out yet another half-arsed report based on some suspect excuse for scientific theory, which, even if anyone important ever got around to reading it in the first place, will be out of date when all the plans change again in two months anyway. It's been a while.
It's a nice change. Certainly one I look forward to getting used to.
The whole story goes back quite a way longer: as many of you would have gathered by now, I've long had this problem where I hated my job. There are assorted reasons, starting with the basic problem that what the firm I was working for calls 'environmental engineering' they would have been better off hiring a civil engineer to do, continuing with the general problem that pretty much any job which involves trying to make the mining industry spend money on anything worthwhile is like beating your head against a brick wall, and ending with the ongoing frustration of how most of the rest of the people in the office I've been working in are, while not fundamentally evil in all respects, still the kind of guys who think jokes about how women should stay home and cook all their meals never get old, and that the suggestion that global warming was invented purely by scientists for a research grant is incredibly witty and insightful, even when they've just brought it up for the third time in two months and all laughed about it like they've never heard it before. Then there's my boss, about whom I've said enough in previous posts. Needless to say, I've been in the market for a new job for a good long while.
Finding one has been more of a problem. I was being picky, on the basis of wanting to be sure that I'd be doing something I'd enjoy next time, but the application process developed into a discouraging pattern: Apply for job. Get promising response. Get called in for interview, which goes well, and get assured they'll get back to me within a week or two at most. Wait a week or two, phone up, get told there's been an innocent delay and they're still making up their minds. Wait another week or two and do the same again. Finally get in contact with them to learn that they're so sorry to have kept me hanging but they've decided I'm not quite what they're looking for, or possibly that everything's fallen through and they've decided they're not actually hiring anyone at all. Lather, rinse, repeat.
On the other hand, I'm one of those crazy people who actually really enjoyed her university degree. I went through my last couple of years with a great group of people, got to take a lot of units and be involved with a couple of projects that were genuinely interesting to me, and had my final year thesis supervisors trying quite hard to convince me to come back and do a PhD by the end of it. At the time, the overwhelming feeling I had was that no matter how much I liked uni, I'd been there five years already and it was high time to go do something that wouldn't involve committing to another three years there. Now, however, with a few years of well-paid experience in how much life outside university can suck, and rapidly coming to the realisation that all the interesting jobs out there that hadn't rejected me already required higher academic qualifications, things looked a whole lot different. So I called up my old supervisors to say I was maybe-sorta-thinking about perhaps considering the possibility of maybe coming back and doing a PhD, to which they responded just as encouragingly as before. Except that I hadn't picked the ideal time to raise the subject - there were months to go before the next round of scholarships would become available, but hey, at least that gave me lots of time to think about topics and make up my mind. Work continued to suck in the interim. The universe continued to fail to supply me with any better employment.
Then I got an email to say there was a mid year scholarship round going for people who wanted to start before the end of the year, and it closed in a couple of weeks, and would I be interested? Hell yes. The application was intimidatingly formal and required a couple of paragraphs summarising that topic I didn't have figured out yet. I was assured 1) this was absolutely essential for the application process, and 2) this did not actually have to be the topic I eventually wound up doing, and a dummy topic courtesy of my supervisor would do quite well enough. The important things are that I made the deadline, that news that I'd gotten the scholarship came back a couple of weeks before I left for Melbourne and hinged on the requirement I started a week after getting back from Japan. That, in a nutshell, is why so little on the subject has been said around here until now.
Showing up on the first day was a bit of a harrowing experience. I am still convinced it must have been some kind of miracle that when I got there there was anyone around who had any idea who I was or what I was doing there at all, or that one conversation with my supervisor was all it took to give me at least the comforting illusion the topic I'd been toying with so far was not only workable but made a lot of sense. Details have yet to be hashed out (a state likely to be maintained to some degree for at least the next two and half years) but it's similar to my original final year thesis topic, so at least I'm in familiar territory. To save you all the bother of asking, it's going to be on using wireless sensor networks to study microclimate parameters... and I can already see eyes glazing over at the back there, so suffice to say it sounds good to me.
I'm still waiting for it to dawn on me exactly what I've gotten into. I wasn't initially reluctant to commit to three years on a single project like this without reason, and I won't know until December until whether I've got one of the higher value scholarships which are enough to actually live on without undue stress. I am quite aware I'm likely to start twitching at the mere mention of my thesis within a year of now. And yet... I like being back at the university. It's a nice place to work, in a department full of people who mostly remember me from my student days and whom I mostly remember fondly, and who share a lot of my general philosophies about the world being a place worth taking an interest in. And damn but it's nice having something to work on that feels like it could go somewhere interesting, no matter how much work that might take me - especially as opposed to turning out yet another half-arsed report based on some suspect excuse for scientific theory, which, even if anyone important ever got around to reading it in the first place, will be out of date when all the plans change again in two months anyway. It's been a while.
It's a nice change. Certainly one I look forward to getting used to.