Profile

Alice Harpole
Excited about the LIGO discovery of gravitational waves!
Curriculum Vitae
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Education:
Westcliff High School for Girls 2003-2010, University of Cambridge 2010-2014, University of Southampton 2014-present
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Qualifications:
GCSEs, AS English Literature, A level Maths, Further Maths, Physics & Chemistry, BA & MSci Natural Sciences
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Current Job:
PhD student
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Employer:
University of Southampton
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My Typical Day
Coding, debugging code, reading papers and creating pretty simulations.
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Read more
My days at work are mainly spent doing three things: reading scientific papers, coding and drinking coffee.
As a PhD student, you still have a lot to learn, so there is a seemingly endless supply of papers to read so you can learn about what other people have already done in your field.
My PhD involves modelling physical systems using a computer. To do this, I work on writing my own code and adapting existing code to my project (primarily in Python and Fortran with the odd dash of C/C++). Unfortunately, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a programmer must spend approximately 95% of their time debugging, so a large part of this time is spent trying to figure out why my code is not doing what I want it to and attempting to remedy this. When my code does work, it can produce pretty images of swirling fluid like this:
I fuel my reading and coding by drinking a lot of coffee (spot the espresso machine next to my desk in the photo below!).
When Iām not doing science / drinking coffee, I sing in a choir, play guitar, bake/eat lots of cake, attempt to learn languages (currently French, German and Welsh) and have recently started taekwondo. I also somehow find the time to watch plenty of Netflix.
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My Interview
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What's the best thing you've ever done in your career?
As a scientist, you sometimes get to go to conferences in cool places ā last summer I got to go to Stockholm which was pretty great
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My profile link:
https://ias.im/u.108422
My Comments