Back in London ... Uninspired.

Greetings from a mildly chilly London. I’ve arrived back from Malta with a bit of a cold and absolutely no inspiration whatsoever.

I received a rejection yesterday from the University of Edinburgh’s PhD program in Neuroinformatics which was kind of a blow. I thought after the interview that I had approximately a 50% shot of getting in there; and maybe I was right. In any case, this now means that I have no clue what’s going to happen next year.

In some ways, I feel that my hard work this year has not paid off. I don’t know that much more than I did before, and I’m certainly not a better programmer (I think I’m actually a worse programmer due to lack of practice). My maths skills haven’t really improved much either. Yes, I can read and understand much more complicated stuff than previously, but I can’t really do anything more complicated than previously.

On the other hand, I’m not sure whether I actually did hard work this year. It certainly felt like I did, but in hindsight I simply took some fairly low-intensity classes and did projects. My second ISO is crap, so despite spending a lot of time on it I don’t think I actually worked hard on it – there’s a big difference.

Overall, then, rather demoralized; the vacation did very little to re-energize me the way I’d hoped. I might take today and tomorrow off in London and just chill out at home and do nothing. I have this constant pounding headache and sense of disorientation that won’t go away; maybe a couple days of absolutely no activity will help that.