Some preliminaries

There is an obvious need for a little background to get this PhD diary started and I suppose the main points to cover are the normal who?, where?, when?, how? and why?, a task I shall endeavour to cover succinctly now.

Who? is me, Richard Watts, proprietor of arbitrary constant, and where? is the maths department of the University of Surrey based in Guildford. When? is a timeline that starts roughly at the start of October 2003 and finishes in three years time, though whether that will actually be the case is another matter entirely; as for how? and why?: these are the questions I intend (partly) to answer within this diary.

The motivation behind keeping this diary is a desire to fill one of the many voids associated with postgraduate study in the United Kingdom. Higher Education (HE) has for so long now been seen only as those hazy, lazy days of undergraduate study, and though this is to a certain extent justifiable, it does not serve to aid those wishing to go on to further study following the end of their first degree. Nor does the apparent lack of information concerning so many fundamentals of postgraduate life help potential students (the fundamentals being accommodation, funding, work, spare time, required academic standards etc.) and so, through detailing my experiences, it is hoped there will be some information of use to other students as they move onto their second degrees and postgraduate university study.