From primary school to PhD

[Music] this is me just after being born and this is me just before sitting the final exam of my PhD in mathematics a few things happened between those two effects so the final exam of the PhD is called a Biver short for viber watch a viva voce meaning a spoken exam so unlike basically every other exam I've taken in education from age 4 to age 27 I wasn't gonna be assessed based on my written responses to set questions I was going to be assessed based on how I talked about something specifically talking about this this is my PhD thesis snappily titled quasi GS terrific influence at the polar stratosphere on the troposphere and while I will make a video about this in the future sort of in detail talking about the science until all the science in it has been published I'm not gonna do that so that will have to wait but for the time being suffice to say it's about physics in the atmosphere the virus serves a few purposes one to determine if I actually wrote this to determine if I understand what I wrote and three if I can answer questions about how my work fits into the broader work on the subject into the literature now here's the kicker Viper's are slightly different all over the world but in the UK they consist of you a room a world leading expert in your field an academic internal to your university and no time limit well actually my university recently installed a time limit so I knew that the whole driver had to be done in less than four hours four hours of answering questions about your work from a world leading academic so I had some preparation to do here's me two days before the VIPRE I've reread my thesis twice now and I've been making notes on I think likely questions that kind of come up and now today I'm going to continue because I've been doing this for on and off the past couple of days I'm gonna go back and reread papers I'm going to practice some derivations that they might ask me to do I'm gonna get default answers ready for a couple of questions it's actually very difficult to know how to prepare for this because I didn't know what they cannot ask I know the thesis backwards like nobody on earth knows this thesis better than I do it's a question of what angle they take and I can maximize the probability that I will be able to answer their questions by thinking of answers to them the most likely ones but I know I'm gonna get blindsided ah what kind of powerless something that I'd like to emphasize here is that it's amazing to me that I am in this situation like as a kid academically I wasn't anything special when I went to secondary school which was my local state comp I was described as having a scatty approach and specifically a mess I was making good progress but I needed to guard against unnecessary distractions in class I've never found math easy or intuitive I mean it was actually the subject that caused me the most grief for the first years of school and so like any kid in that situation I would get distracted I would chat I would not want to do the difficult thing but something happened between year 7 and year 11 then my maths report for that year there's this really nice quote I continue to be most impressed by Simon's conscientious attitude his study and its determination to succeed there are occasions when he finds difficult concepts challenging but he is always ready to ask to the help he needs to be honest I don't think I'm a particularly clever person I do stupid stuff all the time but if there's one thing that's got me from that point in year 7 to where I am now frankly it's just not giving up ok so a bit of an update it's now later I have been working all afternoon on fiverr prep let me show you my desk my atmospheric physics textbook incidentally if you're interested in like the basics I'd recommend this one this is the second edition of woloson hops and then behind that is my actual thesis and I was actually just looking at some stuff to do with transfer economics but you'll also notice is that I've got these tabs on the side so these are for the different chapters you know so I think chats for actually starts on the other Hey yeah so Vanessa quickly gets chat for then there's that and then there's also these which are key tabs for particularly important results and then over here in the workbook I've been doing some practicing derivations and I've been going through things like deriving qgp VD trying trying to derive Earth's helpp wish they'd have to be really sadistic to ask me about I spent way too long actually going through that and then realizing you know what this is a bit obscene so I've moved on I've done a couple of pages of um other derivation and I'm gonna keep doing this for about another hour or so and then I need to move on to do some YouTube things like writing scripts I just dropped my pen like writing scripts editing that yeah new chibi things and then all day tomorrow guess what I'm doing to link the story up to the present day I after secondary school I went to Oxford to study physics which again I'd still it's kind of unbelievable to me that that happened because my local state school the state comp had never sent anyone to Oxford to study physics before and no one in my family had ever even been to uni before I went to San Peter's College which of course is the best college at the University and a dog stood I got specifically interested in atmospheric physics after I took a course in geophysical fluid dynamics which is the physics of how large-scale fluids like water and air move on the surface of a rotating planet which that's so cool look at the geostrophic equations those are two equations that describe how massive fluid air masses move in responses to changes in pressure like how cool is that so I did my Master's Oxford and then I was actually offered a place to do a PhD there but that didn't happen so it is a day before v-day this morning I've been looking through some papers then I've also been continuing book work in particular taking notes on this paper which I've taken notes on like twice before but it was written by one of the guys who is examining me my external examiner actually here is the body the main examiner so I think it's important I understand it because it's relevant to my thesis and it'll probably come up and I don't want to look like read it because I have read it several times I just wanted to rush myself other than that I'm gonna reread my thesis again and I'll do the same tomorrow on the train down to Exeter and I might practice a couple of derivations again you know try to hold an entire phd's worth of background information in your head at once not the easiest I don't even know how many papers I've looked up now I mean the back of this thesis own pillows it's the back of this thesis is one two three four five six seven yes eight pages of bibliography and I basically need to be able to talk about well certainly the key ones there are some papers which you're throwing is like oh I'm talking about that statics there's like a it's really this is Griffiths read that textbook and then some of them are like this is why it's overly simplistic to say that the principal mode of variability in the troposphere is the mean latitude of the Jetstream like I need to actually know about paper backwards this is a lot just about holding it together if you want more details about this then you can check out my draw my life video but basically in my Master's year in my final year at Oxford I got into a very very bad place and I worked myself completely into the ground totally burned out and then instead of getting help for my then rapidly unraveling mental health I doubled down and I worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and I went into my final exams severely sleep-deprived and extremely depressed and having self-harmed and I of course did terribly so terribly in fact that I missed out on the relatively easy condition required to get my PhD place confirmed at Oxford and so I was I was cut adrift that or the offer was withdrawn and I spent a summer not knowing what I was going to do with my life alright it is the night for my visor alright it is the night before my visor I spent all day looking through papers looking through kind of key questions that might come up and what I'm gonna do now obviously at 10 o'clock before bed as I'm gonna finish rereading the thesis there's best part 100 pages to read and I'm going to quickly skim through never split the difference about Chris boss which I talked about in my book club basically being a great book to read for getting more out of personal negotiations and then month I don't know there might be a couple of useful things in it that might help me tomorrow but at this stage it basically comes down to me getting on a train tomorrow going to Exeter and talking about my work I think I know the thesis well I think I know the theory behind it well if they asked me to derive some of the equations in it you know key for the background I can they asked me to read arrive my theoretical results I can do so I think I'm ready I don't know if anyone ever really knows if they're ready though it's like getting married or going abroad on deployment if you're in the military for the first time you know like I've read about it I've heard what other people's experiences have been like but I don't really know what to expect I think I'm doing this under the best circumstances like kid so whatever happens I think basically done the best I can which is a nice situation to be in by a stroke of extreme luck my meant to be supervisor at Oxford knew that another academic at the University of Exeter was looking for a PhD student and they both agreed those good enough to do a PhD and that they they thought I deserved another chance and so I was offered this place to study at Exeter so despite having never seen the campus before or knowing anything about the University other than some of the research that was going on in my department I moved down and I loved it if you haven't seen them already I made vlogs of my entire experience of Exeter from the beginning to the very end there'll be a playlist linked down there in the description and somewhere up here on the screen and a car during my time extre I was super aware that I was given a second chance and so I threw myself into everything you could do as a student I did music student radio sport research outreach traveling but more than that I was singularly determined to reward the faith that my supervisors have put in and produce work that was good enough if I failed to if I failed to produce academic work academic contributions the word to standard I would be failing them and I'd be failing myself and that's of course would be determined by the Viper so it's less than an hour until the Viper now I've eaten I've kind of gone through my mental checklist of all the last thing is the check and I reread my notes and I read the thesis and practice the spiel that you give at the start when they say so tell me about your thesis I've done that I guess this is it here's how the vibe went down I arrived about 20 minutes early because I was terrified of being late and I checked the room number fifty times and then eventually the academics turned up said hello went straight in the room they confirmed for 5-10 minutes and then they invited me to come and sit down now I didn't film the Viper because I can't but that's basically the reason why I didn't do it I know that I think it was sixty symbols filmed there Viper but it was again would have gone against University regulations I don't think the examiners would have wanted it and also I wouldn't have wandered it because I wouldn't want to relive the terror because if you ask people that have gone through the Viper system what it was like they will say that it's terrifying and enjoyable no I don't know about you but those aren't two emotions that I would frequently put together it turns out that what those people mean by that is that the Viper is terrifying and then it gets enjoyable eventually and then it gets terrifying again the terror set in almost immediately after they've done the soft warm-up question of so tell me about your your thesis what have you learn that's new anybody can answer that and then after that they asked me to go up to the whiteboard and talk through a few things and draw some diagrams and some equations and specifically they wanted to know about something called the brewer Dobson circulation now I know about the Brad Dobson circulation it's a quite an important process in the stratosphere which is where my research was taking place but I had a complete mental blank and they kept prodding me and I only kind of stumbled through the answers after they kept sort of prodding and how helping me and hinting along I felt like there was going very very badly after that things improved and the Terra kind is subsided as we went from the background chapter to the theory stuff I'd done I mean the way that the viber works is you just go through your thesis page by page by page and little post it by posted that the examiner has put in their copy and you just going through everything that they thought was anything that was wrong anything that wants discussion and as that happened and you went in to the original stuff that I've done it became enjoyable or certainly more enjoyable because at the end of the day this is the only time I will ever have a conversation with anyone who was read my entire thesis and understands it and you know they understand they understand it in the context of the literature so when people have in the past have said to me I enjoyed my viola I get it in the middle of going through my results we came to the section on my ppm version code now a longtime viewers of the vlog know just how much pain and suffering that code caused me and so I was really quite worried when they got to that point and asked me to explain what I'd done over several pages a few key plots just just there like just talk talk me through this what have you done here and that either meant that I'd done it wrong or they really misunderstood what I'd done across this whole section of the thesis neither of which would have been good news but the Viper carried on until the end of the thesis we've got to the last page closed it we talked about the implications of the research for sort of current thinking on the subject and then they were like thank you you like to step outside and so I waited outside for 5-10 minutes or they made a decision and the terror came back I was very conscious in those 10 15 20 whatever it was minutes that this was it this was the finale of my 23 years of education from cute and adorable in primary school teenagers awkward and then uni and failure and then I hoped Redemption I can't tell you how slowly those minutes went by and then I passed I have a PhD I'm now gonna cut to me about an hour after I finished the fiver to talk about the verdict in a little more detail so they were like we were very happy to say that you know you have passed you are we're gonna give you the PhD they didn't give minor or major Corrections basically they have a tick box it was like how long do you think they need to do these Corrections and they said we're gonna to the six-month correction box not because we think you necessarily need that much time you could do this in three months which is the other option but we'll just give you a bit more time from what needs to be changed based on that Corrections is a couple of extra sentences in the background dealing with how my work fits into the existing work so that's not very much work and then there's also a little bit of extra analysis which is rewriting some code that I've already written with an extra dataset basically just comparing it which is kind of got a pivot how positively the whole thesis feels you know how positive the the results are because they were like you know you've done stuff here which is really good it's just you're presenting in a very negative way so just do a little bit of we need obvious analysis really think if you take along and then you know it's gonna come out so much better so they're like yeah you know we'll give you six months to do that that tick box sound like you know if you were asking you to do a little bit of extra analysis even if it's really simple like that sounds like this tick box but there's really I came into this being like if I get major I'm gonna be disappointed but they emphasize that really there's no difference between major and minor Corrections any more like if there if there ever was it's just a question of how long you need so I prefer if there was a less that needs to be added to the thesis but I think they they seem to be they thought that the conclusions are really cool the takeaway from it they were like I've not seen that before that's really cool you've kind of disentangled this phenomenon from the existing literature and like you've identified this as the same thing that's really interesting they know they've they're like developing just showing how it's kind of developed through the literature any understanding of it so they they seem to enjoy reading it and they feel that scientifically was interesting so I'm happy I mean I'm really quite happy about I'm not the only one that's done though so this is Tom who we started up here it's doing the same day to 2013 and there we are both pH done we have so we've just spoken for the roommate here you had like a month between submission doing the Bible eat that yes I submitted for the very beginning of December saying yes the same day as you and I have my Bible on 4th of January I didn't really get Christmas break or anything yeah I at least have a little bit longer but we're now with both my supervisors like a proud parent now could be like oh we've had the two kids they've grown up and they've gone on you're now working here at the unity it's you're still not really oh sorry there is a difference if you see Tom around dudes guilt death yes he'll be wearing one of those say hi because he's great and I'm gonna now go and go to the pub and I did indeed go to the pub but you're not seeing that footage so as of a week ago I am now subject corrections doctor Clark which is insane yeah that's the bananas to be complaining saying and I want to say to anyone who's watching this who's struggling with studying at school or at uni that if there's anything you can learn from this story from from my example it's that the single most important thing you can be as a student is determined yes it's not enough to just blindly plow hours in to working and it's not enough to just have the discipline to sit at your desk every day you've got to work smart and you've got to actively engage with the material you're learning but the single most important thing as a learn is to put the work in if you don't work then neither will any of your carefully constructed plans you've got to be willing to put the work in and never give up refusal to give up academically has got me to where I am now despite of my intellectual shortcomings that's the end of this vive err story and just like to repeat as I said in my thesis hand in video thank you so much to everyone who has supported me here on YouTube online your never-ending support really really carried me across the finish line so from the bottom of my heart thank you in many ways this PhD belongs to all of you - it doesn't it belongs to me I the person who gets it but in some ways metaphorically we all learn this but mostly me if you're new here and you'd like to check out all those PhD blogs then click up here if you would like to know what I'm doing next then click up here and if you'd like to subscribe to this channel and be alerted for all the great videos which are coming up and believe me there are some great ones coming up then click the link here thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 389,159

Keywords: University of Exeter, vlog, uni, university, college, PhD, grad school, University of Oxford, school, maths, GCSE, failure, redemption, motivation, inspiration, never give up, study, studying, PhD viva, viva, viva voce, story, from primary school to phd, simon clark, simon oxford physics

Id: JHgtCqriMY4

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018