Odds & ends
Short story competition - winning entries!
Sarah
1st prize goes to Sarah Pasfield-Neofitou, PhD candidate, Japanese Applied Linguistics, Clayton
Upon starting my PhD, I received a package. Every so often, I open the lid, gaze at its contents, and inhale deeply…
Starting postgraduate study, like starting anything, is a menagerie of new experiences. So many new smells. Freshly printed sheets, aged books, new ink, jars of fresh coffee, the plastic casing of a laptop computer as it heats up to temperatures not yet experienced, after many hours of use.
There are the hallmark sounds too. The clatter of a keyboard, the uncapping of new pens, the crinkle of pages, the jolly whistle or click of a just-boiled kettle. The pounding of my heart at my first conference presentation.
However, there is no sound that pleases me more when reading than the SHOOSH as ink flows from the perfectly intact fibres of a highlighter, soaring over the most important points, words, letters, tiny specks of lasered ink. And none that irritates me more than the awful, cat-retching scratching of a horribly dry highlighter and it’s worn, tattered, burnt-out fibres, reducing my page to a dusty, slightly yellowed pulp.
shoosh!
…Banana, strawberry, orange, lime, blackberry, grape…
The colours of my twelve fruit-scented highlighters stare out at me from inside the box.
SHOOSH.
Tirith
2nd prize goes to Tirath Ramdas, PhD candidate, Faculty of Engineering, Clayton
When I started postgrad study I showed up at my supervisors door for the first time, having read a fair bit of a dry 300 page US Department of Defense technical report on Topic B that my (at the time prospective) supervisor suggested I read, only to discover that he no longer thought Topic B had merit as a research topic and he suggested I have a look at Topic A instead, which was what I wanted to research in the first place before he told me to look at Topic B. Good one. You got me. Now I want to finish postgrad study and become a Professor so I can do the same to some other poor schmuck.
Wai Ho
3rd prize goes to Wai Ho Li, PhD candidate, Intelligent Robotics Research Centre, Clayton
I began my PhD in Robotics and Computer Vision nearly four years ago. When I first started, all I knew was that I knew very little. If I went back in time to inform myself of my eventual research path, I would have responded with "Mind if I steal my own idea for the PhD?". As time travel has its own issues, I never did this due to laziness. Looking back at the time I spent deciding on a topic maybe I should have given it a shot.
After many hours spent in vain explaining what my research is about to family, friends, strangers and random people at the airport over the past four years, I have come to the following conclusion. Most people think robots are interesting and intelligent. While I sincerely and whole-heartedly agree with the first assessment, the latter, unfortunately, is very, very far from the truth. If I got a dollar for every time I hit my robot's emergency shutdown switch in response to artificial intelligence stupidity, I would be spending my vast fortunes on the time travel back-to-the-future-esque self-plagiarism scheme I described in the first paragraph.
The End (occurs when I finish writing my thesis)
