The week was interrupted by a Wednesday trip to Rudy’s Pizza, after which we attended a talk given by Professor Vincent Croset. What surely seemed on the outside to be a regular session with the Laidlaw cohort felt much more special. Well, notably, the day began with me working at Spoon’s. The unlimited coffee refills certainly set the day off to a jittery start. After my morning of heavy caffeination and semi-concentration on work, I headed to lunch.
During a rather messy carb-loaded consumption with my cohort, I was struck by how individualised each person had become in my eyes. It is not to say that I was first experiencing sonder or perhaps a quarter-life crisis; instead, I suddenly felt overwhelmingly glad for having committed 6 weeks of my summer to the program. Let me explain.
First of all, it makes me incredibly excited to be surrounded by people truly passionate about their work. It reminds me of a quote from the movie Rounders: “Life is on the wire. Everything else is just waiting.” Whilst within the film’s context it is meant to encourage the character to play at high-risk, high-stakes poker tables, we can just settle with doing low-stakes academic research. Nonetheless, it creates an encouraging and supportive atmosphere, especially since we all have the same time frame and will all unquestionably be rushing around attempting to fine-tune our research by the end of the period together.
Second of all, I cannot speak for the program at every university, but at Durham, outside of the leadership sessions, we scholars are given free rein over the structure of our research. I’ve been enjoying the hands-off approach, placing greater emphasis on the outcome of the research and cooperation with the cohort than on the structure of our individual work. Not that the latter should be neglected, but as I have found speaking with academics, everyone has a different approach that works for them.
Anyways, there was my speedy reflection of the week as the rest of it was spent with my burrowed down into the little corner of my field I dug myself. Oh, and yes, it's a nice and cosy hole.