Michi’s blog » read post

Weekly posts - a new feature at this blog

  • April 15th, 2006

Now that my blog returns to its status of a PhDiary as I actually got a PhD position, I will introduce one flavour of regular postings. Instead of keeping in touch with people by mailing lists, livejournal, and everywhere else, there will be weekly postings here about life as a German PhD student.

So far, my entrance into German academics has had one feature above all else. Bureaucracy.

In order to even look at my contract, I needed to go, specifically therefore, to Jena, to fill out a questionnaire. This questionnaire is geared towards ascertaining that I am a good representant of the German state and its ideals. So, there are questions upon questions upon questions about my involvement with Stasi, my involvment with former DDR, whether I went to party schools, whether I’ve held party offices, et.c. et.c. Not to mention the centimeter-high stack of papers I got home to fill out on my own. With complete curriculum vitae from the age of 14. And Gods only know how many different obscure decisions to be made and forms to be filled in.

I still have a few open slots, but hopefully I can get help filling those in when I’m in Jena. I’m planning on ambushing the department secretary.

I have actually managed to read up a little bit on mathematics too - I still have a rather loose grasp of it; but it seems that the object of study for my next three years will be \operator{Ext}^\mathbb Z_pG_*(\mathbb Z_p,\mathbb Z_p) and various aspects of it. There will be more about this here on the blog in the future - I can promise that.

Want your say?

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

post navigation
about
Michi is a recent PhD working in homological algebra and applied algebraic topology. This blog is his outlet for texts with some manner of thought put into them. Over at his LiveJournal intimate details and streams of consciousness might be found.
Not all here is mathematics. All here, though, are my personal thoughts and opinions. Please read the about page (linked above) for more details.
This blog uses statcounter.com for logging and traffic analysis. In order to identify return visitors, this site will issue a cookie on viewing the blog.
RSS Travel plans
Recent Comments
Tags
Categories
Blogroll
Family
Mathematician blogs
Archives
the rdc* theme