Today is the last day I’ll be spending in Singapore for a long while; as several friends and my colleagues know, I’ll be leaving for Perth tomorrow morning to do the remaining 3-4 years of my Ph.D program on campus at Curtin University. It’s a pretty strange feeling in several ways. For starters, this will be the first time I’ll be leaving Singapore for so extended a period of time – a few years I can manage; but it’s something else to leave for so long, and from indications, if I do accept any teaching responsibilities on campus, my research work will take stretch.
I also feel a genuine sadness at leaving Informatics, my ‘home’ for more than seven years now. Being in a single work place for so long means one develops substantial bonds and attachments to not just one’s colleagues, but also friends and the many students who have graduated, many of whom who still keep in touch with me.
This Ph.D program has also been costly in every sense of the word too. A huge amount of time over the last 6 months has been spent in planning, making arrangements for my migration over; and the amount of money that will be eventually invested into this will be easily in the few hundreds of thousand dollars.
Still, it’s a new opportunity where I consciously feel a phase of my life coming to an end, and the next one about to start tomorrow – in one sense, my research work will be like embarking on a long journey where I will travel around the world attending conferences and learning new ideas, get to (eventually) present my ideas and papers to a bunch of probably very critical academics, all of whom I have to acknowledge as my betters. It’ll certainly be a miracle if I can pull this jaunt off! I have probably less than half the confidence that my sponsors, character referees, my supervisor, and my Godmums all have in my being able to complete this program successfully.
This page here will continue to be updated with personal thoughts and reflections; in the mean time, for friends who’re interested in learning about the journey through my eyes and words, do pop by to my Ph.D web site.
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