First gown wearing of the season

This morning was a Tutor's reception, followed by the college photo, followed by lunch. I met my college tutor, Dr. Judith Bunbury (very nice, short, friendly), and the DOS for compsci, Andy Harter (ex-MD of AT&T Research, also very nice, not so short, friendly). It would appear that I'm the college's first ever compsci PhD student, which amazed me somewhat.

Alan Mycroft (my supervisor) has me signed up to do quite a bit of Part 1B supervision (second-year undergraduate tutorials to several groups of 1 or 2 students each, in non-Camspeke). Andy Harter has asked me to do Dip. Compsci project supervision next term. It looks like I'm relatively in at the deep end teaching wise, which on top of the work on the paper means I'm likely to be keeping myself off the streets for a while to come!

The college has turned out to be very friendly, much more so than my experience of ChCh, Oxford. I've met quite a few very interesting fellow students so far. It's my first experience of a mature/graduate college, which is proving to be quite different to my previous experiences of university life. At Teesside, there was no real grad student sepecific social life, but (for whatever reason) we didn't really integrate with the undergrads either. ChCh had separate undergrad and graduate common rooms, which made for more of a social life, but our community was relatively small compared with the undergrad population. Eddies is unusual in that it accepts both graduates and undergraduates, but it has no demarcation -- there is only one CR. I was a bit worried that this might be a repeat of the Teesside phenomenon, but oddly enough it really seems to work. The undergrads here are all without exception mature students, and nearly all of them have a story to tell about hew they got here. Like me, I suppose! The graduate students are more of a mixed bunch, including people who are simply moving straight from undergrad degrees into PhDs and masters degrees, but again there seem to be a few who got here by circuitous routes.

Seems pretty good so far...!

Just signed up for the pool team

Yes, pool, not polo. Go me. :)

I looked longingly at the signup lists for more active pursuits, but arthritis fears stopped play. I think someone had their eye on me for women's rugby (by size alone I'd be frightening!), but I avoided it. Still, pool is better than nothing. I might not be up to competetive standard, but I did manage to win a 3 against 1 game the other day against doseybat, galliana and panzerpenguin. :-) I should say that most of them needed to have the rules explained from scratch, so my victory, enjoyable as it was, does need to be seen in some kind of perspective.