This week I am in Milton Keynes takin part in PPARC’s Summer School. PPARC is my funding body for the PhD, it stands for Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. They have put up around 100 of us in the Jurys Inn hotel in MK and we are attending lectures daily at the Open University, which has its headquarters in the city. The Summer School takes place annually for new PhD students and moves from university to university each time.

I have been enjoying the talks for the most part so far, several have not only innately interesting topics but also have been delivered with enthusiasm and humour. There are of course always those people than manage to produced endless black and white slides, showing dull graph after graph but on the whole so far, the former is outweighing the latter.

With six talks each day this week, the going has been a bit tough. We seem to get back to our rooms only after around 8pm which makes it a very long day. I have been relaxing late at night to the odd rhythms of BBC News 24, trying to digest the days eclectic mix of lecture topics.

So far we have been given the cutting edge brief on

Robotic Telescopes
Gamma Ray Bursts
Cosmic Microwave Background
Magnetars and Quasars
Astrophysical Jets
Galaxy Formation
Large Scale Structure of the Universe

There is plenty more still to come and I shall be outlining some of the above topics in the coming fortnight. I’m looking forward to Friday’s exoplanets talks and tomorrow’s astrochemistry. Can it be that this kind of enthusiasm and edgy research is a good taste of things to come? I hope so. This week is really getting me excited about getting back into physics again in a couple of weeks time.