Durham

Durham is a picturesque historic city in the north-east of England, on the River Wear. It is home to Durham Cathedral and Durham Castle, which together form a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of Durham. Its tower, visible from almost everywhere in the small city, gives Durham its character. For all its history, Durham is above all a student town. Durham University, founded in 1832, is often called the third-oldest university in England after Oxford and Cambridge, and its students make the city an interesting blend of ancient history and young energy. Durham is perhaps best known for its long riverside trails and green banks. My favourite, without question, were summer barbecues by the river on a sunny day, though you could seldom count on the English weather not to be grey and gloomy.

I moved to Durham in the autumn of 2014 to start my PhD. I joined Hatfield College, the second-oldest of the university’s colleges, and lived in college accommodation for the first two of my four years. The college system in Durham, as in Oxford and Cambridge, works differently from, say, India. Indian colleges usually have their own academic staff and run their own courses under the university’s supervision, whereas colleges in Durham look after the social side of student life and leave all the teaching to the university. Hatfield was founded in 1846 and takes its name from Thomas Hatfield, Prince-Bishop of Durham and the last warrior-bishop in England. It has a large Victorian campus on the Wear, east of the cathedral, with over 1,200 residents. While I lived in college, I served on its postgraduate common room (the MCR) as IT Representative, which mostly meant designing and running the MCR website.

In my third year I moved to a quieter part of town with my friend Leo, who was my housemate for the rest of my time in Durham. It was quite a walk to work, but on most days a pleasant one. At first I was anxious about leaving the safe haven of college for the real world, but living with Leo turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. He is a resourceful friend and an amazing cook, and his in-the-moment outlook on life nicely complemented my more introverted approach to things. Around the same time I started hanging out with Mike and Omar, completing the quartet of LMAO, each of us working towards a PhD in high-energy physics. My fondest memories of our gang are the lunchtime Capriccio Mondays at a local pizza place.

For some reason I still can’t fully comprehend, the British have decided to classify theoretical physics under mathematics. As a result, I did my PhD in the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

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