It’s a brave new world. Universities, once busy centres of social interaction, intelligent discourse and complex drinking games, have become ghost towns which echo with only the sound of remote learning servers.
Instead of a blog post this week enjoy this short 3 page comic of An Academic Christmas Carol. In a change from the normal one week – one blog post schedule the three pages will be posted one a day over the next three days. So today enjoy Page 1 of An Academic Christmas Carol
Being a fresher is a strange experience. For some it’s the first time they’ll be away from home, living with new people, strange people… VERY strange people, and starting to study subjects in the kind of depth they only feared in their worst nightmares (especially that one where you had to Read more…
If you haven’t noticed, it’s Olympiad season. I’m not especially sporty myself – I quite like sports but just in a “lazily half-arsing them in a park on a Sunday” kind of way and not “watch them and wave tiny coloured flags while wearing very expensive branded shirts”. But right Read more…
Update: By popular demand this blog post is now available as a downloadable PDF. Last week, I had the always very enjoyable experience of marking MSc theses. This year I had 5 to mark in a week – which was about all I could manage without burning out. But as I Read more…
One of the parts of my job that I really enjoy is teaching the younger generation of scientists. Sharing my years of knowledge and experience, and watching them try to copy me is just adorable. I often find myself wiping a sentimental tear from my eye as their first experiment ends with Read more…
It’s a brand new year and as tradition dictates, a time when we make impossible promises we have absolutely no intention of keeping. So in keeping with this time-honoured ritual (which apparently dates back to the Babylonians) below are my resolutions for 2015. While they are based on my experience and many, many Read more…
Over the last two weeks, the majority of my effort and time has been directed at doing one very important part of my job – supervising students. I find student supervision really rewarding and I’ve enjoyed training and helping people ever since training up the first person to work for Read more…
Last week I didn’t post a proper blog post because I was super busy. Generally, I manage to get an Errant Science blog post done even when I’m snowed-under with work but last week was different, last week I had to look after teenagers. In the UK when you’re about 17 Read more…
For those who don’t know, a science Master’s degree (MSc) is often split into two parts – taught and project. In any given MSc, the taught course is the same for all the students, but the projects are chosen from a list prepared by various other academics in related areas. Read more…