Today’s post marks a new low for this blog: I’ve managed to craft something that’s (a) shorter than the usual fare, and (b) entirely unrelated to the topic that I promised to discuss last week, the term ‘Anglo-Norman’. This second topic is still forthcoming, but in the meantime I figured that it would be a good idea to return (briefly) to one of my key motivations for starting this blog: chronicling the PhD experience.
Over the past week or so, Things™ have started to happen in PhD-land. For one thing, I’ve completed my registration! The University now officially knows that I exist (and perhaps more pertinently, they have my contact address, phone number, and so on). During registration, I was reminded of an interesting technicality, one common to many PhD programmes in the UK: upon starting at Exeter, I won’t actually be a PhD student. New doctoral students begin, officially, as MPhil students, before being ‘upgraded’ to proper ‘PhD student’ status at some point during the first year. I suspect that this will be a topic of some discussion later on in the year, somehow …
Along with registration, I’ve begun to make full use of my new Exeter username and password to do some poking around exploring of the opportunities offered to postgraduate research (PGR) students. Since I’m very keen to gain some teaching experience during my three years in Exeter, I was particularly attracted to the one-day Teaching and Learning in Higher Education course offered to all those who might have some role in teaching undergraduates. My excessive gusto has, though, had one slightly awkward consequence, in that I’ll be doing the course – which is on 12th September – three days before my induction. Still, I have no doubt that it, and the lessons I’m sure I’ll learn from it, will provide ample material for another future blog post.
Accommodation is also coming together. As anticipated, the University was unable to offer accommodation to many people (like me) who didn’t meet certain conditions – that is to say, anyone who wasn’t a first-year undergraduate or a new international postgraduate student. A consequence of this has been that, over the past few months, I’ve been visiting Exeter quite a bit in order to view potential places to stay. After quite a few late-night train journeys, and one unpleasant occasion when I was beaten to it by five minutes, I’m pleased to report that I’ve finally secured somewhere. The next step is to read the twelve-page contract before signing, but as things stand at the moment it’s looking good. Don’t go expecting any YouTube-style room tours, though!
A rather bitty update, then, for which I apologise. Normal service should resume next week, when I attempt to unpick a second underlying question that is essential to my PhD project: what is this crazy little thing called ‘Anglo-Norman’, anyway?
Edward Mills 
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