Tick Tock

Today, I have started the final stretch.

It's odd, you know. I've got to know so many people in the last six months that it's strange that in three weeks time I will have nothing more to do with them. Friends? Sure, I guess you'd call them that. But how much of a friend is a person that you've known for such a short while and won't keep up with after that time? I'm really quite sad at the moment. I'm trying to block everything out and not think about it too much and at the same time treasure each little pretty moment, even when it's not going to plan, there are still smiles to be spread, somehow. It's so hard because underneath I feel the clock is tick-tocking and it all be over in a heartbeat.

Have you ever played those video games where you work your way through the area and different parts of the map become revealed to you as you achieve particular goals or find secret passageways or whatever? Well, sometimes I feel it's a bit like that. As an undergraduate, you know the lecture theatres, you know the teaching labs and you know a handful of professors, namely the ones that teach the modules or take the tutorials, and you don't see much outside of that box and you go home and play with your actual friends who doss about as students are wont to do. Standard behaviour.

Once you get to the point when you're working in a real research lab, all day, every day, you begin to discover faces and places you never realised existed, or at least not in the same way you might have imagined it and the strangest part is that you're a legitimate feature of  the whole scenario. This has been somewhat like being a fresher, in respect of finding your feet, getting to know new people and working your way around the area. It's only now that I'm beginning to appreciate the inner workings of the department.

For three years, the postgraduates were our superiors. Now, they are not quite equals, but somehow we've moulded into their routine, become a part of their exclusive group. We socialise together and all of a sudden these previously untouchable boys are joking with me and acting as if I am one of them, albeit of the opposite gender. I am still patronised, I am still near enough the bottom of the academic pile and if there's a dirty job to be done, or an experiment gone wrong, it's bound to be me who's responsible. But I'm not talked about as a third party, or seen as an inconvenient nuisance all of the time. I am a person who has conversation and opinions of value, who has something to offer beyond chemistry. I am a colleague, a companion, a friend. 

In three weeks this will all end. I don't want to do a PhD. But nor do I want to leave university.

I'm really quite sad at the moment.

On the jukebox: Donora ~ Shout