You know when you'be been watching charmed too much when:

Walking upto the shop you see a man in a bowler hat and rolling a crystal ball across his palm and you think Warlock!

Getting rid of my drafts.

I... have a lot of free time at the moment, what with the lack of uni and PhDs  and I decided, as you can see, to redesign the blog. Isn't it pretty now? I have also decided to clean up my drafts and post them because to my mind, these post show an accurate window into my state of mind over the last year or so. I wrote the following in April, right in the thick of dissertation writing.

I am coming to the realisation...

...That the last four years have been a waste of space. After university, I had three plans. The easiest by far was to stop at a degree and settle down into a medium grade technicians job, probably for the next 60 years given the way pensions are going. 

The next choice was to find a Ph.D. (depending on my degree) and going into research for my career. Better paid and (hopefully) more interesting.

The final choice was to do a graduate entry medicine degree, get my MD and go into medical research from the clinical side. Which I really really wanted to do, and have, secretly since, well for a long time.

Due to a lot of reasons, my choices are now a lot more limited. I'm stuck to West Yorkshire, and Leeds/Huddersfield in particular, and maybe Manchester or Sheffield at a stretch for reasons I wouldn't change for the world. This... narrows down my choices quite considerably. And then there are the fee changes. This messes up most of the other plans completely.

The area question take the medicine degree out of the running. At the time of looking, for a post graduate entry onto a 5 year course (which is all Manchester and Leeds are offering), because I effectively already have a state funded degree, I would have to pay my own way for the first four years of the degree, and then the NHS would pay the final year. If I was going to enter this September, that would be over £12,000 I would have to find for tuition fees alone. and then everything else such as living costs, course materials, et al, would have to be found on top of this. If I was lucky, and either Manchester or Leeds offered the fast track four year course, I would only have to find the first year's tuition. But I'm not. And I would need to start in September 2012 anyway, as I need to re-do my chemistry A-level, to bump it up a grade from a C to a B. Which means I would be starting when the new fee system did. And be paying £36,000 for the first four years.

Impossible. I have now been priced out of the market for any further degrees I might want to take and so have thousands of others. I know people I went to school with who were put off by the thought of the debt they were going to be in whilst paying the current fee levels. If they were put off by being £30,000 in debt after four years, imagine being £80,000 in debt, and how many people that would scare off. And yet, this £80,000 pounds of debt is their only chance of getting a job decent enough to live on, and raise a family on. And if you had to fund it yourself, well. 

Hello class system. Welcome back to Britain. Have a nice holiday?

But what is even better than that is the fact that I'm getting my degree now, after four years of working hard, and it isn't worth anything. Not a single penny of the tuition fees the government has loaned me. Because I don't have a first class degree. Now, I'm on track for a middling to high 2.I, somewhere around 65%. I know this, and even when I started this would have been a brilliant degree to get. It would have left all those doors open for what I wanted to do. And the degree was in an expanding field, so I was guaranteed a job...

Rubbish. 

So many people have degrees now that unless you have a first you are not going to get a job. Used to be that having a degree was promise enough that there would be some job out there for you. Now, with this certain upper second, and I say this before I sit my exams, I have nothing. If I went for a technicians job, which I wouldn't be too unhappy in, I can expect £13,000 to £16,000 pa. This is more than I live on as a student, but there is this too: Everybody is looking for a job at the minute. All of my year, half of the year above, and come next June, all of the year below. There is fierce competition for every position advertised. And some of those applicants will have firsts.

And  because of this, people are turning to post graduate training. The budget has been slashed. There are less directly funded Ph.D. opportunities. Which means that they are accepting self funded students and competitively funded students, and for the latter, they want the student who will get them the funding for their research. I asked one of the lecturers  what was wrong with my CV after I was turned down for a Ph.D. I was told that the first thing they look at is the grades. If the candidate is not predicted a first, the rest is thrown in the bin. 

That was as far as I got then. Since, looking back, I was right about some things: I did get a 2.i at 64%. Not the best, but decent. I'm proud of it and of the fact the little nagging doubts and thoughts in my head telling me to quit for almost the entire four years didn't win out. Being busy helped me ignore them. I was right about jobs too. A sister of my friend is preparing to defend her PhD thesis, whilst doing her day job. As a school technician. Time was a HNC/D was enough for that, even as a university technician. But in brighter news, in some other things I was wrong. I did get a PhD interview. Even if I didn't do well. Not knowing what to expect is a bitch, no? 

And I still wouldn't change the factors that anchor me to West Yorks. I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't have gotten nearly so far through my final year if not for the support a certain person gave me.


Things are more positive now. It's amazing what half a year will do. If I can get one PhD interviews, I can get others. 


And I will.

In support of Libraries

Is this. A sculptor has been creating paper sculptures and leaving them all over Edinburgh, in the libraries and at the lit festival. No one knows who does it but they leave little notes with the sculptures and they are addressed to the twitter account those libraries own. My favourite one is this:
Espically the note that was left with this:

"For @scotstorycenter - A gift in support of libraries, books, works, ideas..... Once upon a time there was a book and in the book was a nest and in the nest was an egg and in the egg was a dragon and in the dragon was a story....."

Isn't that beautiful?