PhD thoughts

I still haven’t heard anything about the PhD opportunity in my old department, other than that funding has been applied for but they won’t know if it’s been granted for another month or so. I’ve tried looking for individual funding (the research councils only give money directly to universities for specific projects, rather than individuals), but almost all the grants and trusts available are for people who are ‘disadvantaged’ in some way—such as being from an ethnic minority, a woman going into engineering or having a criminal record. If you simply don’t have the money to pay for the cost of doing a PhD full time (and who does?), then you’re stuck with hoping that your university of choice gets funding, allocates it to a project that you are interested in and then picks you for the project.

However, another opportunity has arisen, which came to me via one of the mailing lists I’m subscribed to. The Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents is offering a doctoral studentship in ‘E-Science, Imaging Technology and Ancient Documents’, which would lead to the award of DPhil (which is what Oxford calls a PhD for some reason). They’re looking for a graduate with significant computing experience (mostly experience with Java/C++ and XML to a reasonably high level) and with knowledge of Latin and/or Greek as well as an interest in humanities-based research. Hmm, that sounds like someone I know…

I’m not sure whether to go full steam ahead with this though. Advantages include the fact that there’s probably not going to be much competition (I’ve yet to bump into anyone who has the level of programming knowledge that they’re after and has a significant amount of ancient history knowledge), I’ve done a lot of academic networking (including giving a paper, which I think will go down well) and I’ve worked on an academic research team before. I’m pretty sure I could get good references too, and I’ve already met one of the doctoral supervisors and expressed an interest in his area of work (this was before I knew about the doctorate—in fact I asked where the project was going next and it would appear that I have now found the answer!).

The main problem I see with applying though is that the application form states that a first class honours degree is ‘essential’—although after asking the graduate studies administrator I discovered that they will consider my application anyway, and to be honest I can’t see them finding many people with a first class degree in computer science who would want to do a doctorate involving a significant amount of work in an unrelated subject when they could instead have a well-paid job in the IT or finance industries. The other thing that bothers me is that this is Oxford, and it has a reputation for being a difficult university to get into. On the other hand, I didn’t think I would get on the course that I’m on now, so anything is possible.

Of course, if I was offered the studentship I’d have to move down south, which would mean leaving behind most of my friends, family and organisations such as MFoE which I’ve invested an awful lot of time in. On the other hand, Oxford is a lovely city, has bookshops other than Waterstones (including second-hand ones—and yes, that is something which is important to me), and is already quite green and lefty. I’d be doing work which related to two of my major interests with some of the most respected people in the field, genuinely contributing to the subject (I’d have to in order to get awarded the DPhil) and still able to get anywhere in the country within a few hours by train.

Hmm, this is a really tricky one, I think I’ll definitely need to talk it over with a few people first.