Sam, regardless of how you got to Cambridge you earned your place, you earned the right to be there and you got there on your own merits with no one else's help. Stay focused, stay aware, you are destined for greatness.
I respect Sam for his statement on his A-Levels, as I felt the same way about my results. But I am now in the Master course of my dreams! It’s all about the passion and drive for the subject!
Just two days ago I got rejected from the University of Munich for my Masters. I too like Sam fucked up my university entrance in India, and got into a university with not much prestige. Despite doing very well in the Bachelors, well enough to beat students from prestigious universities at the industry level, I'm still having a hard time getting into a prestigious Grad school for Masters. However, Sam's perseverance gave me hope. It's after a very long time that I wept. Thanks Sam for sharing your A-level story, thanks for inspiring me to persevere; maybe one day we shall meet face to face in Cambridge. Finally, thanks Simon for churning out such content.
I'm currently in a masters research placement righting my dissertation and these videos do make me feel more hopeful that I can get over the hurdles. Though with all the uncertainty that the future brings I cant shake the anxiety that I may not be good enough or hard working enough to achieve my academic goals. Knowing that the next step isn't as unattainable as it might appear is comforting.
Love this series. Great learning what Sam is working on when he's not Doming team mates in XCom 😂. Also love that you included the punting side quest one of the funnier bits of that stream. Looking forward to seeing more in the series
Love this series Simon! Im inspired from Sam's story and it hits hard as I just finished a very though physics assignment and need the motivation to not give up. I shall wait more from this PhD series
Very interesting! Sam seems like a lovely chap with a very admirable attitude to academia. Nice wee boost of inspiration to my hopes of reinventing myself as a physicist.
Great video as always Simon, you are putting great effort in your channel and other science projects and that deserves huge respect and I can say you are great science comunicator. This series of other people doing PhD is great, but I would love to see a story about someone doing PhD in chemistry( organic, medicinal) as I am someone from that field, and I am considering similar career for myself. All the best Simon, keep doing this.
Two minutes in to the video and I am greatly disappointed to learn that "galactic archaeology" is not in fact applied historical xenosociology. I was all stoked for a 20 minute video about techniques for detecting alien megastructures like Dyson swarms and artificial black holes.
can't wait for scientists in the future to describe stars and galaxies in great scientific terms such as "chonky boi"... "this new star we discovered is actually quite the chonky boi!"
This interview is so so wonderful for me. I did my bachelor's at a very respected university in the UK - but still not Cambridge, and I got into Cambridge to do an MPhil. The second I got my offer I felt inadequate, and even now I have a hard time not comparing myself to the undergraduates at Cambridge and wondering if I should even feel proud to call this my university, maybe I'm just a fraud, maybe the true prestige lies with being an undergraduate there and I can never belong to Cambridge because it isn't where I did my BA? I hope I'll be able to shake off this feeling that the ones who got into Cambridge from the start are inherently all superior to me. Even if they are, I just want to be able to put these thoughts at the back of my mind and concentrate on excelling and proving that I deserve to be here and I deserve to call the students of Cambridge my peers. It is honestly also so reassuring to hear that even Simon himself - someone clearly so accomplished and intelligent, someone I and thousands of others look up to, feels the weight of being at Cambridge and the pressure of the legacy and name of this institution. We in the UK do romanticise Oxbridge a lot, and we often do place them and their graduates on a pedestal, but there's a reason why!
*“If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.” - Jim Rohn*
I know a guy who thinks Andromeda is the remnants of the sausage coming back around to finish the collision he's running off the size of the sausage and the size of Andromeda he thinks somehow they're one of the same and we just kind of have it realized it as a whole and a scientific community 🤷🏼♂️
Is astrochemistry similar to galactic archaeology? This is a serious question, because I think astrochemistry is not per se oriented towards galactic archaeology, but there may be tools from astrochemistry such as chemical abundances that can be applied.
It’s not that it’s similar and more that we use it. The figure showing the “peanut” is coloured with [Fe/H]. Chemical abundances after velocity is the most important thing
