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The Thing I was wittering about in my last post is an MPhil thesis. MPhil is the degree you can get if you haven't done enough original, high-level work for a PhD but have still done some. Essentially, it's the "I failed a PhD" qualification.
The reason it's an MPhil and not a PhD is because I was completely insane for vast amounts of the time from December 1997 until early 2003. I made one stupid decision which spiralled entirely out of control. Basically, I couldn't get a PhD place in the Chemistry department at Imperial because both of my potential supervisors were short of funding, so I had been going to do an MSc or MRes and then apply for a PhD the next year. But because my application went into a central pool, I got phoned up by a supervisor from the Space and Atmospheric Physics group who offered me "a chemistry project, really" to do with the modelling of soot aerosol pollution in aircraft contrails. My supervisors spoke to the guy and thought it was a good opportunity, and I thought "well, it's the same university I'm already at - what can go wrong?" and took it. Worst Mistake Of My Life.
Firstly, I was expected to teach myself all the relevant parts of a 4 year undergraduate physics degree in 2 months, with no help because the lectures wouldn't be until the spring term. Then I was expected to take a Met Office model with 50,000 lines of code and write new parts to add what we were trying to model (I am seriously not a programmer). I didn't fit into the research group socially, because everyone else went out for drinks most evenings to watch the football, and although I explained over and over again that I could not come to the bar because my asthma means I cannot breathe in a smoky environment, I was shunned. It was seen that if I had no interest in watching football with them, then I obviously did not want to be friends with them - when I'd have been happy to go to Starbucks with anyone, and even regularly brought back coffees for other people! No one wanted to talk about interesting things like books, music or science in free time, only bloody football and rugby and cricket. So none of the older postgrads or postdocs were willing to help with my problems.
I went to a conference in January 1998 and went down with glandular fever because I was stressed beyond belief. At the time I had no concept of spoon management (I don't think it had even been invented yet), and did not listen to the cues from my body. For some reason, I decided that it would look terrible on my CV if I dropped out after 3 months and went crawling back to Chemistry for a new project. I was already starting to spiral into depression and didn't even realise. Eventually, I got to the end of the first year and failed my Transfer Report (the thing needed to upgrade from an MPhil into a PhD). The head of department was horrified by the level I was working at, and I already felt like the most stupid person on the planet. Never mind that a person must be bloody clever to get 12 As at GCSE and 4 As at A-level and a 2:1 degree from Imperial College, I was convinced that I was a total fake, that I'd got onto the course under false pretenses. Of course, mental health provision at Imperial was nonexistant. (I'd already seen several doctors at the health centre during my undergraduate time, where I'd been told that if Prozac didn't help, I wasn't biochemically depressed, so it wasn't their problem. I went back because I was randomly falling asleep all over the place and putting on tons of weight, and instead of doing tests for illnesses that cause chronic fatigue they bitched at me about what I was eating - when I had no access to a kitchen to cook for myself!). ( Read more... )
The reason it's an MPhil and not a PhD is because I was completely insane for vast amounts of the time from December 1997 until early 2003. I made one stupid decision which spiralled entirely out of control. Basically, I couldn't get a PhD place in the Chemistry department at Imperial because both of my potential supervisors were short of funding, so I had been going to do an MSc or MRes and then apply for a PhD the next year. But because my application went into a central pool, I got phoned up by a supervisor from the Space and Atmospheric Physics group who offered me "a chemistry project, really" to do with the modelling of soot aerosol pollution in aircraft contrails. My supervisors spoke to the guy and thought it was a good opportunity, and I thought "well, it's the same university I'm already at - what can go wrong?" and took it. Worst Mistake Of My Life.
Firstly, I was expected to teach myself all the relevant parts of a 4 year undergraduate physics degree in 2 months, with no help because the lectures wouldn't be until the spring term. Then I was expected to take a Met Office model with 50,000 lines of code and write new parts to add what we were trying to model (I am seriously not a programmer). I didn't fit into the research group socially, because everyone else went out for drinks most evenings to watch the football, and although I explained over and over again that I could not come to the bar because my asthma means I cannot breathe in a smoky environment, I was shunned. It was seen that if I had no interest in watching football with them, then I obviously did not want to be friends with them - when I'd have been happy to go to Starbucks with anyone, and even regularly brought back coffees for other people! No one wanted to talk about interesting things like books, music or science in free time, only bloody football and rugby and cricket. So none of the older postgrads or postdocs were willing to help with my problems.
I went to a conference in January 1998 and went down with glandular fever because I was stressed beyond belief. At the time I had no concept of spoon management (I don't think it had even been invented yet), and did not listen to the cues from my body. For some reason, I decided that it would look terrible on my CV if I dropped out after 3 months and went crawling back to Chemistry for a new project. I was already starting to spiral into depression and didn't even realise. Eventually, I got to the end of the first year and failed my Transfer Report (the thing needed to upgrade from an MPhil into a PhD). The head of department was horrified by the level I was working at, and I already felt like the most stupid person on the planet. Never mind that a person must be bloody clever to get 12 As at GCSE and 4 As at A-level and a 2:1 degree from Imperial College, I was convinced that I was a total fake, that I'd got onto the course under false pretenses. Of course, mental health provision at Imperial was nonexistant. (I'd already seen several doctors at the health centre during my undergraduate time, where I'd been told that if Prozac didn't help, I wasn't biochemically depressed, so it wasn't their problem. I went back because I was randomly falling asleep all over the place and putting on tons of weight, and instead of doing tests for illnesses that cause chronic fatigue they bitched at me about what I was eating - when I had no access to a kitchen to cook for myself!). ( Read more... )