WTF of the Day

Professors have nightmares sometimes---thoughts and dreams that infect our souls, curve our spines, and keep our country from winning the war. There are a few of them, but for many of us, one of them is when we walk along a street like Cornmarket in Oxford and see one of our former students playing a guitar while people toss coins into his guitar case. Oh wait... that actually happened today!

The student in question (whose name I won't reveal, though I know he's read my blog occasionally, so I'll wave a brief 'hello') is quite clever. He is part of OCIAM's Masters program in applied mathematics and computational science. Actually, he just turned in his dissertation on Friday and will be formally defending it in an oral exam (a so-called "viva") in a couple of weeks. He sings in an a capella group (which performed at the Edinborough fringe festival, for example), needs to practice his guitar, and figured he might as well earn some money while doing so. That's pretty sharp and amusing, and I wouldn't be telling this story on a public web page anyway if it weren't innocent. I was a bit surprised to see him, and I asked two of the obvious questions: (1) What are you doing? and (2) Does our program really cost that much money? (Apparently it does.)

Now I wonder how many of the other street performers I see on Cornmarket Street are actually Oxford graduate students. Also, my student probably saw several other people he knows. Oxford is a small place and you pretty much always run into people you know when you're walking around. This student spent some time as a high school teacher, and if any of his former students saw him, they would have a field day! (For the sake of optimizing this story, I very much hope this happened.) My student is well on his way to having a fantastically successful career in whatever scientific field (academia or industry) he chooses, but I'm not going to ever let him forget about this incident, which with this blog entry should become part of the MSc's official lore. (On Friday, we actually had a celebration of the program's 30th birthday. I wish I could have told this story two days ago, but alas it only occurred today.)

Did I mention that I like good stories?