I have just realised that I started my PhD 30 years ago last November. I don’t really count my BA as it was a learning exercise and thus the start date of “I Scientist” was when I began my graduate research career. Of course we don’t (or at least didn’t then) do the Masters thing in the UK.
It is still difficult to remember why I did a PhD. In my final year at Cambridge I did some of the Milk Round job interviews. I think I was interviewed by STL (now part of BAE I think), Chloride Group, possibly Harwell and one or two others. I was actively considering a Ph.D. but I had no idea in what, other than metallurgy and/or materials science.
In the 1970s materials science was metallurgy. I think we had about 12 lectures on ceramics and polymers and a similar number on semiconductors; although ceramics with all those funny crystal structures featured in the crystallography course. I think I toyed very briefly with protein crystallography as an idea for a PhD but in those days biology was a strange land and I ended up doing a PhD supervised by the staff member who had supervised my undergraduate project. I am not really sure why, considering that the UG project was a misconceived disaster. Nonetheless I ended up as his very first PhD student. I arrived a month late as I had been working in the USA that summer. I was shown a desk, handed a copy of a PhD on sintering theory and told to develop a model for diffusion bonding. This was research in the deep end, my supervisor had no experience in quantitative modelling, he had worked in diffusion bonding briefly, the research group was me and an equally new Postdoc from Canada working on electron microscopy of some alloy system that had no relation to my project. The office/lab was shared with another equally new research group that had a PhD student from Pakistan, who had been there 1 year and had spent most of that time playing cricket. There was another new PhD student in the second group who was building a gas gun that fired projectiles at a target that if it missed, would blow the student from Pakistan’s head off. This of course all seemed normal.
There were no courses other than one at the computer centre where you learned how to submit jobs to the IBM 360 using their new-fangled disc operating system and, armed with that FORTRAN course you did as an undergraduate, off you went to do a PhD. It is difficult to remember that you had to do everything, I had to write the graph plotting package to display my output. The largest jobs were 1 Megabyte and those had to run overnight. My wristwatch probably packs more computing power than the University mainframe had in those days.
By year 3 of my PhD the Apple 2 was around, as were Sinclair Z80s and Commodore PETS, a few enthusiasts had Acorn Atoms. By the end of my PhD (3 years on the dot) the program was on the Commodore PET as well as on the mainframe and we could see the way the world was moving. By then the research group around me had grown to 3 or 4 PhDs and another post doc. I moved on to France for a year and my career in science had begun.
Happy anniversary, Brian. I hope I can recall my entry into science 30 years later (21 years from now) with as much detail and fondness as you seem to!
Isn’t it all funny how it seems predestined when you’re looking backward and the epitome of insecurity when looking forward?
Heather, I assume you realise the profoundness in that statement.
Sigh – it’s the story of my life, Lee :-)
Great post, Brian – I know how it feels, all too well. I remember as a child my parents’ excitement at disks coming in (previously cards and paper tape). Massive great thing the first disk drive one was, my Dad took us girls down to the computing lab one Saturday to let us have a look as a special treat. There are a couple of typos in ‘rememberance’ in the title.
Typos are part of the charm (!) and sense of immediacy of posts made late at night after a couple of glasses of wine.
Are we not men? No we are Scientists (to paraphrase very imperfectly).
I can well remember the cahnege in IT provision as I did my PhD – exept that the term IT had yet to be coined.
The really old PhD students (i.e. in year 3+ when I was starting) still had piles of punch cards and there were a few banks of punch card readers near the teletype machines but most work was done on the new vdu’s which had that long lost style of green (or ocassionally yellow) characters on a black background.
When I was writing up my PhD I was in the first generation that used word processing packages (on a main frame!) – I believe it was called Roff rather than employing a secreatary to type it up on an IBM golfball typewriter. Output copy for your supervisoer to read was printed on fan-fold line printer paper and the final copy on a daisy wheel output device. There were no symbol fonts so Greek characters were printed using a macro that shifted abnd backspaced combinationsns on standard characters to produce over printed bastardised versions of Greek. e.g. (-) with a few shifts becomes an omega and ox an alpha. These were ground breaking achievements in their day.