Not two entries ago, I was bemoaning students. Today, I was directed at this comic, which set me off on a proper nostalgia trip and made me think about being a student again. We humans have such a great capacity for hypocrisy… 🙂
Y’see, even though I’m not a great fan of students (or more specifically, student culture, but that’s a rant for another day; perhaps after I’ve been queuing at a bar for half an hour whilst hundreds of the buggers stand around moaning about having no money and how hard their work is before ordering seventeen pints each and missing their lectures the next day), part of me still quite fancies the idea of doing full-time research. Actually, I even gave it a try for a year.
I did a computer science degree. By dint of the fact that I’d been sat in front of a computer almost continually since I my 8th birthday (and despite a messy relationship’s attempt to ruin things in my final year) I did quite well. Having, at that point in time, absolutely no idea what to do with my life, I jumped at the first research post I was offered. In retrospect, this was something of a mistake. I should have jumped at the first research post I was offered that was in a subject area I was actually interested in. I didn’t, and I ended up studying applications of parallelised cell processing using optical interconnects. Which is a fancy way of saying “algorithms”, which, in computing speak, means “unutterably dull”.
The whole thing wasn’t helped by the fact that the simulation software I had been given to use didn’t actually work for anything other than very, very basic systems. I ended up spending 90% of my time writing programs to get round the limitations of the simulator. By the end of my research period, I’d managed to obtain, well, absolutely no results whatsoever. This posed a problem. A thesis which basically said “I have no results, and so therefore, in conclusion, I am unable to say anything useful at all” is not a good thesis. So, I did what every sensible person would do in this situation. I ditched it all in and got a job instead.
I did feel a bit guilty about this for a while, especially as a neglected to mention to my supervisor that she shouldn’t be expecting a completed thesis any time soon. But I felt a bit better when I later discovered that all but one of the other people in my research group had done pretty much the same thing in the following year.
Sometime afterwards I found out that the research group I’d done my third year project with (and who I’d thoroughly enjoyed working with) had several research posts, and would have been happy for me to have taken any of them.
Chalk one up to experience. At the least, I’m being paid now 🙂
I still get that longing to go back and do research every time I visit the cities where I was a student. I dunno how people can live in the same place as they studied and not miss it every single day ‘cos I know I would.
Okay, being paid is good and I don’t mind my job most of the time but I loved being a student. They’re threatening to take on students in the evenings to do all the crappy jobs that no-one wants in the place where I work. All I can say is that they’d better keep their mucky little mitts off my iMac. In case you didn’t know (and there’s no good reason why you would know) I am now converted and counting down the days until the mighty Panther is released.
Algorithms aren’t dull! They’re lovely! My highest Uni exam score was in Advanced Algorithms. Make of that what you will.