Not the Real World?

To ring in the start of term and another crisp autumn season here in England, a colleague of mine recently threw an impromptu dinner gathering which, much to my delight, ended up in front of a log fire. There we were, 8 postgraduate students pursuing 6 very different research topics, representing 5 different nations engaged in yet another series of late night conversations. When the medieval historian from Moscow and I had exhausted the topic of bizarre facts about Kim Jong Il’s diplomatic relations with Putin (possibly relevant to my research?), our attention ricocheted to a discussion on green investing between an MBA, an environmental scientist and an MBA turned environmentalist. During this time the sole maths DPhil among us, having remained silent for most of the evening, managed humbly to make his presence known by offering a bit of classical guitar relief to the more heated social scientific buzz about.

As the last drop was being drained from our host’s glass thus signaling the end of the night, one couldn’t deny how cliché the entire event must seem to the outsider nor escape previous exclamations made by friends with city jobs - or by parents who wished we had one – about how ‘this isn’t the real world'. On the contrary, I find that ‘this’ is very much the life and work of a graduate student. It was, after all, this very same natural inclination toward curiosity beyond our undergraduate years that led us here in the first place, curiosity first about our personal academic interests, gradually expanding outwards into a larger intellectual debate. Perhaps this occurred across disciplines, at times across borders.

And somewhere on a beach in Holland, two other graduate students, Dan and Esther, were already at work designing The Graduate Junction to facilitate precisely that. Since joining the team, I’ve been motivated tremendously by their responsible vision and overachieving dedication (Dan bought a ‘how to’ book and taught himself to code practically overnight while Esther managed to complete her Master’s thesis soon after relaunch!) as well as by the collaborative energy coming from others in our rapidly growing global graduate research community. Next step? Recreating any and all late night fireside chats online so as to spark future global conversations across The Graduate Junction community. Unfortunately, cool guitar playing maths postgrad not included.

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