Unexpected Lessons
Adapting to crisis and making adjustments is something that is intrinsic to good leadership and is a skill that has been widely discussed by all of us in the 2019/20 Laidlaw Scholars cohort. This summer has forced me…
236 articles found
Researching Clouds from the Safety of the Great Indoors
I was ready to take on my second year as a Laidlaw scholar when disaster struck, the Coronavirus pandemic has made my project no longer feasible. At first, I was panicked and confused. Where will I work? What will I do…
Addressing three key questions faced on my journey to become a critical researcher
I am a scholar conducting my second summer of research in social anthropology. Last year, I started my research on elitist education in Kenya. I spent three weeks in Nairobi to discuss my research with the principals…
A Make-Believe Museum: Creating an Online Exhibition
As you may have seen in my previous post on the Laidlaw Scholars Network (or linked in, and twitter if you happen to follow me there), I have recently launched an online exhibition using the social media image sharing…
‘The Curse of Living in Interesting Times’, Historical Materialism, and the Synod of Brefi
The story goes that there is a Chinese curse, wishing the recipient to live through interesting, or exciting, times. Like many oft-quoted nuggets of ‘wisdom’, the attribution has proved impossible to confirm, and…
Undergraduate Research Amid COVID-19
Many people told me to ‘expect the unexpected’ when it comes to research, but I certainly was not expecting anything as extreme as a global pandemic! I was very fortunate that my project did not have to change too much…
I wish I was Rocking All Over the World – Lockdown Research on Ancient Life in South Africa
In my blog post last summer, I recounted a series of adventures that my Laidlaw colleague, Lot Koopmans and I had in the game reserves and government facilities of South Africa. I talk about how I encountered…
The curious case of curves
In my blog a year ago I talked about my experience getting to grips with research and I related some of the discoveries I had made about the ideas behind curve plotting from James D. Forbes’ (professor of Natural…
Researching Remotely
Well, when I wrote my blog last summer, this was not where I thought I’d end up – back in my bedroom. In fact, I was supposed to be in Australia right now. My original plan was to spend the first summer of my research…
Re-thinking plans in the times of COVID-19
My project is on quantum mechanics and it involves coding with python, a programming langage, to investigate the dynamics of a particular class of phase transitions happening in the quantum realm. Specifically, I am…
