A little over a year ago, I became a phone-answering technical support helpdesk person at Slingshot. And a little on Friday I became not one of those any more, due to having resigned.
It was a strangely pleasant job, and I learnt many valuable skills such as reciting by heart how to set up a dial-up connection for Windows XP, explaining the functions of the various blinky lights on the fronts of routers, and saying “I can’t really comment on that” in such a way as to clearly convey the intended meaning “I heartily agree with your opinion about Telecom”. I also got to sample many of the Auckland CBD’s fine places of cheap lunch, and had many enjoyable conversations with my colleagues.
But Time’s wing’d chariot hurtles ever onwards through the celestial hippodrome of Fate, and so on Monday I take up a new career in the Computer Science Department of the University of Auckland, as a Guy Who Does A Bunch of Stuff. I shall have many tasks, the most prestigious of which shall be tutoring a Human-Computer Interaction course. I shall also be supervising labs, maintaining computer software, writing web pages for staff members and all the other myriad tasks typically allotted to graduate students.
Not that I actually am a graduate student. Or rather, the nature of my status as a graduate student depends very much on the observer. It is true that I have graduated several times in the past, and can prove it by presentation of various pieces of paper in my possession. It is also true that I feel entitled to eat lunch in the Graduate Lounge, although it must be said that nobody requires me to present my papers or wear a gown when I go in there.
Weighing against my being a graduate student is the fact that I still have another semester of undergraduate courses to take before any of my pieces of paper have “Computer Science” written on them. And since this is the subject I am currently studying, it would be fair to say that I am not yet a graduate student with respect to Computer Science.
After some discussion, however, it has been agreed that when I’ve finished the upcoming semester of undergraduate courses, a confluence of events will occur that will unequivocally confirm my status as a graduate student. Because I have good grades in the courses I’ve already taken, a Master’s degree in Mathematics, a planned research programme planned and a couple of people willing to be my supervisors, nobody can see why I shouldn’t be able to start a PhD in the second semester of 2006. This doesn’t amount to formal approval, but as I understand it that normally doesn’t come until a good year after one starts, so I feel it’s as good as settled. Somewhere around July I’ll be starting my doctorate. Hence the graduate student work.
In the course of his academic career my grandfather earned four degrees, of which he was justifiably proud. One evening about ten years ago, not very long before he died, he set me the challenge of doing the same. I’m not sure exactly how I’m doing on that score. I have two degrees I think really count, another that I consider a technicality brought about by loophole in university regulations that I believe has since been closed, and a teaching diploma. At the end of the semester that starts tomorrow I’ll have gained another diploma and started on a third proper degree. I’m not sure whether that will all add up to meeting the score, but in his capacity as a theologian and mine as a mathematician I’m sure that he’d be proud of the degree to which I have managed to obfuscate the apparently simple concept of “four”.