Category: Academia
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The end (and the beginning)
Last week I passed my viva and consequently I have finished my PhD! I have to make some very minor corrections to my thesis, but my three year and three month journey in PhD-land has come to an end. I thought I was going to be fairly melancholy after finishing, for a number of reasons.…
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Writing my PhD thesis
How do you write a PhD thesis? This question sounds like the start of the old joke: “How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time”. A PhD thesis is a document which must explain, summarise and defend three or more years of research in your chosen field, often running to 40,000 words…
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Thesis off-cuts: the reproducibility crisis in cosmology
As we frequently hear1, we’re now in the precision era of cosmology. What this really means is that we’re in the era of measuring things really well, and we’re getting really good at measuring things because we keep building ever more enormous and powerful telescopes. I remember attending the STFC Introductory Summer School on Astronomy…
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Superior by Angela Saini: essential reading for every scientist
The death of George Floyd in the United States earlier this year sparked a flurry of long-overdue activity in my corner of academia. For a few weeks in June, everyone was interested in the subject of racism, and for us, racism in academia in particular. An informal strike was held on the 10th of June,…
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Tribalism in science
Last week, a tweet by Roberto Trotta drew my attention to a recent paper by Simon Portegies Zwart that studied the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by running N-body simulations in different programming languages. The figure that caught my attention was Figure 3, copied below from the version of the paper published in Nature Astronomy.…
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Keeping a lab diary as a theorist
Making a daily log of my thoughts and things I tried saved the final year of my PhD.
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How asking a question on Stack Exchange kick started my career in research
I did my undergraduate degree at Aberystwyth University in Wales. I took the astrophysics course, which ran in parallel to the plain physics degree for the first two years, covering all the basics such as mathematical methods, classical mechanics, waves, optics, thermodynamics and so on. In the third year the astrophysics became the main focus,…
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Travelling during the pandemic
This week has been a particularly exciting one, and not just due to the XENON experiment result that has set both the arXiv and cosmology Twitter abuzz. Fate finally smiled on me and the Spanish borders have reopened to non-residents, thereby allowing me a small window of opportunity to return to Madrid to collect the…
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The joy of journal clubs
Presenting papers in journal clubs is one of my least favourite things to do. While I enjoy reading in general, I find reading academic papers a chore, especially if the writing is uninspired or the results obscured by reams of unfamiliar theory. However, papers are the currency of academia and, to stretch the analogy, journal…
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If at first you don’t succeed: Madrid week five
Last week was a week of success for me. I solved a problem that’s been plaguing me for about six months! I’m not going to talk in great detail about what exactly the problem was (I’m saving that for a post in a couple of weeks’ time), but it was one of those small, persistent…
Natalie B. Hogg 