Chapter After Oxford

Oxford University lived up to every expectation I had: beautiful old buildings, bizarre traditions and incredibly intelligent students and lecturers. Here I offer some reflections on my masters year attending the university, as well as life in Oxford outside of the libraries. Finally, I have a discussion on the next stage of my life doing a PhD at the University of Cape Town (UCT).

Oxford Academics

I did the Masters in Mathematical Sciences at Oxford, referred to as OMMS. The program offers modules covering a huge selection of mathematics topics. I found this program very difficult for two main reasons:

1. I was focusing on applied mathematics. Meaning that I was doing lots of work with ODE's and PDE's. The issue is that I have a pure maths background. This meant that, for example, I found deriving a PDE to describe a river flowing was difficult. But so too was figuring out if the PDE was solvable analytically and how to do it, or how to perform analysis on the stability of the steady state of the model. This should have been routine once the model was derived and I am sure it was for people that had a background in this mathematics. But this meant that I had a double learning problem: understanding the background and course content at the same time.
2. Oxford has a very high standard of examination. Far more difficult than the exams that I have faced in South Africa. I found that exams at UCT cover a large portion of the course at a high level. But the Oxford exams would be only 30% or so of the course content but in far more depth than you covered in class. This point is definitely correlated with the first, but everyone I spoke to had a similar sentiment about the assessments at Oxford.

Oxford Social Life

Oxford is a very social city despite its strong academic foundation. There is always a ball you can attend, a sport you can play, a club meeting, a park, a coffee shop or a pub that you can go to. But most importantly, Oxford has a fantastic way for you to meet people to do these things with and that is your college.

The collegiate system is quite bizarre when you first arrive, and hard to wrap your head around. The analogy I have come up with is just that the university is just an examining board and your college is your school. I have spent almost all my time at my college and in the department. You are never at Oxford University because that does not really physically exist.

Anyway, the college is fantastic because it breaks the university down into a more palatable size. You don't need to swim in an ocean of tens of thousands of students but you can meet and interact with the hundred or so new postgraduate students that have joined the college at the same time. Your college also gives you a way of making friends that do not do the same degree as you. I have really enjoyed this because the conversation can tend towards maths when you are surrounded by people doing maths. Sometimes, at the end of a long day attempting a problem sheet, that is not necessarily what you want.

The academics have been great and it has been good to push myself, but you should get pushed doing any higher level of education. It has been the friends I have made in my college and my course that have made this year worth it. Everyone is so well read, so interesting and so interested in you. It is the students that are the lifeblood of this university; not the famous buildings and old libraries but the people who fill them.

Next Chapter

I am going to miss Oxford a lot; for the reasons outlined here and for so many more. But I am very excited for my next chapter. The background to this, and why it is such a big deal to me, is that I have never really wanted to do a PhD. I never wanted to, and at least for now still don't want to, become an academic so I thought that a PhD was overkill. My understanding was that a masters degree would put me at the correct level of education to pursue the career I want. The flaw in this is that I had no idea what career this even was.

Nevertheless, this is still true in many industries: I am thinking of trading in South Africa where the UCT masters in financial engineering (formerly masters in mathematical finance) is a great platform to then go into the quant world. My issue is that the "world" I am wanting to move into is wanting more than a masters. The companies that I am interested in that use machine learning and physics to solve problems in modelling or engineering are hiring experienced academics. See hiring pages of Emmi AI, Pasteur Labs, PhysicsX. Most positions require a masters or PhD with publications. I do not have this which makes it very difficult to make an impression on these companies.

So, I believe that more opportunities would be available to me if I did a PhD, but that is quite obvious. The more fundamental shift I had to do a PhD this was mental. The routine of PhD students at Oxford, at least the ones I am friends with, resembles someone who is working far more than someone that is studying. On the whole, they work hard during the regular working hours, they have evenings off, and take weekends off. This is very different to the picture I have of studying where it is a craze of revision and assessments. Once framed as a job, a PhD sounds like one of the coolest things you can do. Working every day on things that you care about the most in the world. That is the dream.

I am very aware this is quite a naive idea of a PhD. I know that things get more difficult with presentations and the pressure to publish, but this framing really did open my eyes to the prospect of doing a PhD. A necessarily condition to make a PhD like a job is a salary and a funded PhD is not easy to get.

So I applied to some fully-funded positions at Oxford but did not get them. These are very competitive especially for overseas students. I did not expect to get these positions, it was nevertheless disappointing as funding for research in South Africa is sparse. I did not want to spend my final few months in Oxford worrying about what is going to happen next. I wanted to just enjoy the time I had and try and do as well as I could. So I put these thoughts and concerns aside as much as I could.

I just so happened to see an advert for a PhD at UCT working on the Mi-Hy project when looking at a Slack channel run by my honours supervisor. I was excited but realistic. Funding is still sparse, there will be a lot of applicants to this position so I didn't want to get ahead of myself. Anyway, I did get it and I am incredibly excited about it. I have not written much about the topic of the PhD here. But the point is that I am aligned with both the methods being applied and the goal it aims to achieve.

Away from Mathematics

This is the first step I take in my education away from mathematics. Numerical analysis, machine learning and computational methods live in the intersection of these fields so I am not moving away from it exactly. Rather, to a department that does the type of maths that I enjoy and use the models that I am interested in.

Nevertheless, this move also does fall into a trend of mine towards applied areas. I started with pure maths, then did a masters in applied maths and now a PhD in computer science. Each of these is moving away from the theory and into the application. And so in a way it feels like the correct ending to the narrative of my education.

This is satisfying in many ways, it feels like I am getting closure on an educational journey that I have scrutinised over for a long time. Why did I not do X major instead of Y? Why did I not do X module instead of Y? I have left academia, then come back, then left, then came back. It has not been a smooth journey. But the ends very much justify the means in this context.