Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Starting my PhD!

As I mentioned in January, I was awarded a PhD studentship at Surrey Space Centre. I graduated from Cambridge last Friday, with I Class honours in my BA and a Distinction in my MEng, moved down to south-west Woking at the weekend, and started at SSC today!

I'm having to fight a bit to get a Linux workstation -- other groups in the same building (and serviced by the same IT staff!) use Fedora on their desktops, but SSC has historically been an all-Windows environment. In a corporate setting, I might put up with Windows -- there, at least, there is often a reasonably well-staffed IT services department to take care of the innumerable things that go wrong -- but in my experience, PhD students don't get quite that level of support. If I'm going to be solving my own problems, I want to do it with more powerful tools. (Also, Emacs on Windows isn't nearly as much fun. How can I possibly survive without a properly-functioning compilation-mode?)

Nevertheless, I think I'm eventually going to win the battle. In the meantime, it looks like I'll have to make do with Cygwin.

As far as the research is concerned, I've barely start to dip my big toe into the scalding bathtub of things I don't know, and it feels like I've got a long, long way to go before I get to the things no-one else knows either!

Update: I managed to persuade the computing folks to give me second PC running Linux and a USB KVM switch. So that's alright, then.

1 comment:

PhysicsT said...

and not a single mention of the excessively hairy fella who you thought was awesome and really brainy and cool...