Tag: thesis
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Visa application
I am starting to regret this resolution of writing a blog post every day for thirty days. I’ve already missed a few days so the thirty will no longer be consecutive and perhaps my days are not as interesting as I anticipated. I suppose that’s mainly because this week has been a week of admin…
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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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Thesis off-cuts: how special is our place in the Universe?
Thanks to many hundreds of people making dedicated observations of the sky over many decades, we know that the majority of our Universe is comprised of two substances: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is an unknown type of matter, referred to as “dark” because it does not interact electromagnetically, meaning that it doesn’t…
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Thesis off-cuts: the ancient history of general relativity
I have recently been thinking a lot about what introductory and background material I want to include in my PhD thesis, as my self-imposed December deadline continues to hurtle towards me at an alarming speed. Concurrent with this thinking, I’ve also recently been enjoying a fantastic book called The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O’Shea, all…
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Year Three
With the arrival of the new first year PhD students on Monday, I can officially class myself as a third year. It’s a rather terrifying thought! The past two years have raced by in a blur of reading papers, attending conferences and wrestling with code. I’m now starting to seriously think about my post-PhD career.…
Natalie B. Hogg 