Week 2 Hilary Term

Monday

Short version – I parked myself in the Bodleian all day then did a late night session of Karate!

I’ve never seen the Bodleian this busy in a random Hilary week. During exam time, yes, but random 2nd Week? I went around the entire RadCam, Upper Reading Room, and Lower Reading Room and only after twenty minutes of walking around did I find a single seat. It did have a fantastic view of the Rad Cam though as the sun was setting!

I read several papers on ungulates in Yellowstone, particularly the Northern Range.

Karate starts very late in the evening, it was already pitch black when it started and I didn’t get back to college until 11:30pm! It was a special session led by Ohta Sensei – chief instructor of JKA England. It’s fantastic to have sessions like that!

Tuesday

Ended up being a very language heavy day! Greek lessons have started again, and I honestly felt like I had forgotten everything we learnt last term. I had ‘warmed up’ by the end of it and felt a bit more confident.

The evening was spent at a Burns Night Formal hosted in College! Three wonderful courses, and lots of speeches! If I can, I’ll add pictures below here

Following that, I spent far too many hours working (very belatedly) on my French homework, which really should have been done on Saturday!

Not much PhD work got done today, I’ll admit!

Wednesday

I went to a very interesting workshop at the Careers Service in the morning. The idea around ‘Futureproofing your Career’ and how best to implement AI in different areas.

Early afternoon was spent doing DPhil work and going to the College gym. I’ve been trying to go daily, and the College gym is very convenient.

My French class was sadly cancelled this week, but that gave me time to do a bit of writing. DPhil writing, blog writing and editing, even a bit of journalling!

Thursday

Thursday was a very good day. Every other Thursday, the Environmental History Working Group (EHWG) meets and it is very interesting to see how historians engage with topics. It feels so different to how scientists think about things. There’s always a talk followed by round-table discussions. The speaker this week had such an interesting topic, and everyone really engaged in the discussion.

I spent the day working on my presentation for my supervisor meeting tomorrow. Going to the EHWG really makes me enjoy the research I do, and view it in different ways.

Food in the dining hall was particularly good today. I got it take-away as one of the College cats was in my room, and kept me company (eyeing up my dinner)

Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Again blocking these three together. I spent a lot of time with other people, and because I dislike the idea of a blog that shares too many details especially when other people are involved, I’ll have to be a bit vague.

My Friday morning supervisor meeting went really well! That’s always something nice to be able to share, and it’s not always how these things go in academia. But my ideas were taken well, my proposed next steps were approved. The Lab meeting was absolutely brilliant. It was led by another researcher in my group, and again – since I don’t have people’s permissions I won’t give anything away, but it was a fantastic topic and great talk.

The evening was spent at a SECOND Burns Night event! Two in a week! This time not in my own college. This time had even more speeches (and more Scottish accents), and this time I went to the ceilidh dancing too. My college did have a ceilidh but I did skip on that this year!

The weekend was actually spent mostly walking around town, getting food with friends, and then retreating to my flat to play video games. Flapjack – the other College cat – was in someone else’s house, and I went and collected her. She followed me across college all the way home.

On Sunday I spent some time working on prep for the two tutorials I’m giving in 4th week. I like to give the undergraduate students a week to write their essays (when I was an undergrad I remember sometimes having to write an essay in three days! I don’t want to do that to the students I tutor!), so I’ll set the title tomorrow. One is cetacean culture based, the other an essay on collective living. They’ll have a week to write and return the essay to me, and I’ll have two days to mark and return it to them before the tutorial!