Why Am I Doing This?

That's a pretty good question. The idea of doing this is to essentially blog my literature review and some other things that seem important. Since I'm doing my PhD backwards (it's a long story - in summary I'm gathering data before I've even had an induction), I expect to learn a fair bit that I hope it will be useful to write down here. The main reason I've started to do this is that I read Stuart Sutherland's excellent book Irrationality last year. In it, he says that when you make a big decision, you should announce it to as many people as possible. I figure, there's no more public way to do this than to blog everything I read and publicise this fact. That way, I'll have to read. I'll also have to write stuff down, which will help me remember it (or at the very least give me somewhere to come back to when I forget it all). I'm also going to jot down stuff I find useful in the hope that someone else might find it useful. Or amusing. Or both. So then, here goes.

Chapter 1 - An Inauspicious Start

It had been raining on and off all day. Which is to say that it had been raining "on" me every time I walked outside, and had turned "off" whenever there was a roof over my head. Walking to UCL's Registry in the tipping rain, a less rational person would have believed that this was a sign that all was not going to go well with this whole PhD business. Not me though. I was too busy sulking about the fact that the rain had now soaked through my Converse.

Arriving, I dripped my way through to the main desk and proceeded to complete all the necessary paperwork that would once again make me a student after seven years without an NUS card. Payment of fees, signatures... all remarkably easy following the comprehensive online pre-registration. Then I proceeded to get lost on my way to the Security offices to collect my badge. When I eventually arrived there (if you've never been on UCL's Bloomsbury campus, it's like another world in there; and a confusing one at that), I was soaked to the core. I was asked to stand unwillingly in front of a camera and be snapped for the badge that would grant me full access to the hallowed halls. With hair a mess and glasses streaked, it was never going to be the greatest photo. But that hardly matters. It'll matter in a year's time when I need a focus for my misery.