Into the Doc, the Horror

About a month ago, some typical rainy weather joined me as I set forth on the first day of my physics PhD. It started with the regulars: finding places, meeting people, making passwords, learning how to lift a box... then it really started. Like the blood on the bleeding walls of The Amityville Horror movie, the physics started oozing out. It oozes out thick and fast. The duty of the PhD student is to soak up as much physics as they can, construct it into some sort of original research and still be moderately sane as they tuck themselves into bed at night. It's a hard task. The PhD is three years long and, so far, it seems as though I need to be constantly running to finish in time.

Bleeding walls and physics in the Amityville Horror. 

Madness

My weekly timetable has developed itself into a medley of madness. I have meetings, seminars and lectures to attend. Then I teach undergraduates, mark their assignments, then do my own assignments. This is followed by the all important reading, researching and running simulations. That's why I'm still doing it at nine o'clock at night, flicking through articles or logged into the computer cluster. Speaking of which, if you're a Chromebook user, this SSH client extension will wake you from your nightmare and let you SSH. I was given a lot of advice on how to manage my time. Unfortunately all the advice was the same monotonous drone "read a book called 'How to Get a PhD', by Phillips and Pugh".

SSH on a Chromebook.

How to Get a PhD

Despite the name, which feels a little patronising, the book can be really helpful. It has some various tips and instructions on how to manage your research, what to expect of others, getting offered places and so on. Although you can figure out a lot of it yourself, it's much easier to just read it and save your valuable time and brain power. BRAAAAINS! Of course there's a reason I'm writing this, a Google search revealed that you can download the entire book for free from here!

The End, or is it?

It's that time of year when some of us start to think long and hard about what we're going to carve into a pumpkin. This year, if I don't carve something epic, I want to see something epic. Something physics-epic. Although this one was interesting, I'm not sure why the Einstein vacuum field equations were carved into a it...

Vacuum field equations... on a pumpkin.