What a difference a year makes....

So, in the absence of students, life continues as normal for the various research teams down here in the Queens buildings. We wake, march to University and sit in our little boxes reading, theorising and tearing our hair out until 5 o’clock when we march back, only to be repeated the next day. I hate routines…

Today marked the graduation of Year 3′s which brought back memories of my graduation last year, which was pretty depressing to be honest. It allows me to reflect how far I’ve come in the last year or so and how I’ve not nearly amounted to that image I’d be content with at the beginning of my degree and how perhaps my values have changed. It also made me to look at how much older I am than the vast majority of my colleagues and how different life would have been coming to uni a year earlier. I know the whole experience of that extra couple of years at home was beneficial to me and I was placed there for a reason, but it doesn’t half make me feel inadequate against some of my current pool of mates. This combined with the current lack of air conditioning in our lab and mini-heatwave (we reached 33 degrees) doesn’t make it easy to keep to any train of thought for extended periods.

It makes me wonder where I’ll be in the next year….

Oh – I know! ……. right here sat at my desk