Getting a PhD, Week 1: Indexing Starts at Zero
Photo by Bryan Goff
Week 1: Indexing Starts at Zero
My name is Lachlan Marnoch, and I have just begun a PhD - the degree of a Doctor of Philosophy, an antiquated title from back when philosophy was anything that involved deep thinking about any topic. The specific flavour of thinking which I’ll be doing is on astrophysics. What that means is that I will use physics to try and make sense of information from the night sky. As with my Masters, I’ll be studying fast radio bursts - very brief, very mysterious bursts of radio waves originating from other galaxies. They’re pretty fascinating, and I’ll get to explaining more about them soon.
My undergraduate double degree was in Science (major: Astrophysics & Astronomy) and Arts (major: Creative Writing), although I found throughout those four glorious years that the physics-y stuff took up the bulk of my time. I then completed my Masters toward the end of 2019, capping six continuous years of university-level education. With the knowledge that I had now been at university for just as long as I was in high school (for international readers, an Australian secondary education is six years long), I decided to take a year away from the academic world and to turn my attention toward writing. Tutoring to support myself, and with the bountiful assistance of my girlfriend Joy, I began a second gap year.
This might accidentally have been a very good career decision; as with all things, astronomy ground to a halt during the pandemic. Telescopes closed, conferences were cancelled, and working from home slowed many processes to a crawl. However, my own motivation took a nose-dive as well. I'd like to say that I don't know what happened, but that wouldn't be true; it was the same old tendencies, toward procrastination, toward laziness, bubbling back up, overcoming my tenuous ambitions. Without deadlines, without structure, I find self-motivation very difficult; and self-imposed deadlines just don't have the same sting as a professor-set assignment due date.
That’s not to say that I didn’t get any writing done - I’m actually quite proud of The Journal of Anther Strein, my ongoing fiction series commencing last year, and in which I’ll continue to post new entries to monthly. I wrote a couple of new short stories and polished a handful of older ones, and did a lot of work building my story worlds. I also read almost as many books as I did during my entire time at uni thus far, so that’s something. Plus, despite my shifted focus, I published my first primary-author scientific paper last year (based on my Masters thesis). However, I didn’t get as much done as I was hoping to, and by the end I was dearly looking forward to the daily structure and human contact that I knew scientific research would return to my life. And so it is that I’ve now commenced a PhD in Physics and Astronomy.
What this means is that I’ll be spending the next three years (which, by the time I’m done, will make a full decade since I started attending University - frightening stuff) researching a very specific scientific niche, and then composing a monstrous piece of writing that describes all of the work that I’ve done. I had a taste of all of this during my Masters, but I’m still learning what it all involves.
That's the story up to the current moment. In future weeks, months, and eventually years I'm hoping to keep you updated on this tale of discovery and human endeavour. I'll fill you in on my experiences and how many tears I've shed along the way. As we go, I'll also dip into some of the science of what I'm studying. With a tentative, and heavily footnoted (my occasional plans for regular content on this blog have rarely lasted far beyond the first engagement), commitment to a new post at least once a month, I hope you'll tune in to keep up.