Livre d'Or

I think some of these are specifically problems with lab science PhDs; at least in mathematics I got the sense of wasted thought a great deal, but not the kind of heartbreaking sense of wasted labour when an experiment just didn't work and all you can think of is doing the same thing and seeing if maybe the cells will grow this time - mathematics gives much better diagnoses when it goes wrong.

I had a particularly good supervisor (he was the head of department, which is potentially completely doomsome but turned out in this case to mean that he had a very organised diary and was happy to pencil out 11am-1pm Wednesday every other week as Meets With Tom) with a pretty clear project - he had probably expected me to do something more inspiring, but I got the boring thing working to the stage that it could be applied to bigger numbers than it worked on before.

Nottingham did provide a bit of reasonably structured training - a couple of graduate lecture courses, from which all I can recall is that the Russian scheme-theory lecturer's mumbles were much louder than the sentences around them, and an attempt to do self-organised graduate seminars which was (it turns out hopelessly optimisticly) intended to get us to Wiles's proof of the modularity theorem in four years. I ran into a wall at cohomology, in much the same way that people describe running into a wall at A-level maths; so by half-way through year 2 it was clear that I wasn't going for the academic-mathematician career path.