I think most of you are either already PhD/DPhils, or have no great desire to become one.  But in case anyone is, or knows anyone who is, I thought I'd publicise this.
It's a Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT), which is similar to what I did, with a taught first year, short projects, and then a 3-year research phase.   Except this one is ( Read more... )

Databases today.  Definitely the most tricky yet - although I was also starting from a base of almost no previous knowledge.  I certainly would have struggled if we'd taken the exam in the morning, but three practice papers later, I was well prepared.  There's one question that I might have got partly wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I got ( Read more... )

Many things have happened. Some are good, some are bad, some I'm not quite sure about yet ( Read more... )

I think I have about half of my dataset now.  This is a good thing, as my deadline for handing in the report is the 15th, and this morning I had no decent data.  I have discovered a lot about experimental work, mainly that you will have to do something 10 times before you find the right way to do it, and that working out how to get the data is much ( Read more... )

Yes, I know, *everybody* posts for advice about broadband eventually.

Here's my story:
I've moved into a house with NTL cable phone & broadband.  We have to decide whether to stay or switch (for the next 12 months), by the middle of the month.  Which is a bit poor if you ask me, but there you go.
Anyway, lack of time and general apathy mean that we ( Read more... )

Last week, I went down to Cornwall with
( Read more... )

Apparently I've been living in a death trap for the last year ( Read more... )

One of the questions I keep getting asked, both in Oxford and outside, is "What exactly do you do?". It's not an easy question to answer - "a DPhil at the Life Sciences Interface" usually leaves people more confused than before. Most times I've ended up telling people that I'm working on a cross-over between engineering and medicine, which is all ( Read more... )

For some reason, I agreed to play on the DTC 5-a-side women's football team at the tournament today. We certainly had the best shirts (with our numbers in binary on the back). What we lacked in skill we made up for with enthusiasm. Unfortunately, enthusiasm is not really enough when your team has 3 players who've never played before, and most of ( Read more... )

As part of my course, I do 2 short (8 weeks) projects: one in summer and one in autumn. The idea is that one of these forms the basis for our substansive DPhil research. So at the moment I'm stressing about what to do for my second project.

I've decided on the first one (summer). I'll be looking at bubbles using ultrasound.
( technical details )