Post-Graduate Life

It’s only after graduating that I’ve realised no one has ever taught me how to get a job. Not properly. I’ve been to CV workshops, interview practices, even gotten feedback from rejections, which is a rarity, but, despite various suggestions on how to improve my chances, there’s still a lot that they seem to have left out.

One suggestion that came from a lot of universities while I was still looking and applying four years ago was to get involved in as much as I could to gain a wide scope of experience, and boost my chances of success in later life. In fact, a paraphrase from a student guide at Lancaster went along the lines of “If Joe has a first, but did nothing with his spare time, and Matt has a 2.1, but did loads of extra-curricular stuff, employers are gonna go with Matt.”

Living Without Food

On 4 March 2014, I witnessed a group of police officers forcibly move on some homeless people around Newland Avenue in Hull, the heart of the city’s student population. Their only crime was being homeless, which I don’t feel is a crime, and certainly doesn’t justify the treatment they received. I felt helpless, and had to carry on home, angry.

After I witnessed this aggression towards these people, some of whom I’ve spoken to a number of times, I decided to see what life was like for someone living below the breadline, so in something of a rash move, I decided not to eat for an entire week, from 8pm that day to 8pm the following Tuesday, and record how I felt on a day-to-day basis.

Freshers, Beware. Uni is a Fast Ageing Process

I remember myself two years ago, slumped in the back of my mum’s Mini with so much stuff piled around me I may as well have been part of the luggage. Uni was a fresh start and I was ready to embrace the inevitable changes that come with independence. Though one thing I didn’t bank on is how much I’d age before my 21st birthday.

Someone actually told me this would happen just before I set off, but I dismissed it in my naïve freshers mindset by thinking “Nope, I’m staying this way forever.” Evidently this did not happen, and I find myself looking back on those early days of independence and thinking “Christ, I’d hate to be that guy… again.”

An Inside Job: Perceptions From a Simulated Universe

Evidence from recent tests suggests that the entire universe, everything about our existence and perception, is part of a simulation, but what does this really mean for science and philosophy?

This may sound like a ludicrous suggestion and you may think I’ve been watching too much of The Matrix, but this exists as a genuine scientific theory that’s currently being put to the test by physicists in Bonn, Germany, and at the University of Washington. Whenever we think about moving around, we think we have free realm; any point in space can be occupied by us. However, the researchers in Bonn have results that question this apparent misconception and argue that we are in in fact living by a set of rules, in a simulation, created by a possible “post-human” being.