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Darn! I skipped a week of blogging for the first time. I don’t suppose it will be the last. It’s not so much that I did no work, but that I did too much. I made a leap forward with the network graphing, although it was a frustrating process. I was feeling that I had […]

This was the week I became conscious of the fact that I was enjoying doing a PhD. It was also the week I realised that I can’t just chase around like a lunatic doing stuff. I need to read and write as well. It happened like this: on Monday, I settled down in a corner

I think I will have to start keeping daily notes on what is going on with my PhD-ing, because by the end of each week, it feels like an era has passed. This week that may very well be true. On the ‘secular’ side, I took Monday off to accompany my adult daughter to London

I know I am late posting this log. Last week was my studentship funding body’s induction week. It was lovely to finally get welcomed to PhD life and to have some exposure to all kinds of intellectual excitement and enthusiasm. We even managed to do a bit of socialising, in the new, strangely distanced way

At this point, I feel like I’ve got some kind of horrible experiment going on in the background to test the proportion of ‘normal’ weeks to chaotic weeks in my life as a PhD student. My last ‘normal’ week was about half-way through August, 10 weeks ago. I started this week with good intentions and

For some reason, this is the week that the powers that be had set aside for us to consider the deeper questions of life such as ‘What is history?’ and ‘Why do we do it?’ Personally, I like to take a little more than a week for this kind of reflection. I had planned to

As if by a miracle, my enrolment situation finally resolved itself on Tuesday. I landed head first in a big pile of administration and induction activities that should normally be spread across a good three weeks of a full-time student’s timetable. I’m supposed to be a part-time student so I certainly feel as if something

I would quite like to be talking about exciting, PhD-initiating things this week, but it ain’t quite like that. Let me tell you how it is. Monday I was still not enrolled. But that was OK (sort of), I had an appointment on Tuesday afternoon with the branch of my institution which is supposed to