
PhD students at the Hodge Institute are part of a vibrant and active community. It’s not all about writing a thesis! Here are some other aspects of doing a PhD here:
- PhD students in the School of Mathematics form a combined cohort with those from Heriot-Watt University: the Maxwell Institute Graduate School. First-year PhD students in the Maxwell Institute share an office in the beautiful, centrally-located Bayes Centre, before moving to offices in their home departments in subsequent years.
- During the first year, PhD students take courses through SMSTC, although these can be partially or wholly substituted for participation in other activities, e.g. reading groups.
- All PhD students in the Hodge Institute have the opportunity to participate in the activities of GlaMS, a joint PhD training centre between Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Heriot-Watt, covering Algebra, Geometry, Topology, and Mathematical Physics. GlaMS offers innovative training, including coding training and group projects.
- We run frequent working groups, where a group of PhD students, postdocs, and faculty get together to learn and work on a topic together. One of the fun aspects of the Hodge Institute community is that our research is so interconnected that these working groups often overlap between multiple research groups, providing an opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other.
- We run many seminars:
- There are weekly seminars in Algebra, Geometry, and Category Theory.
- The Hodge Seminar is our colloquium-style seminar. We run a pre-talk (with pizza!) beforehand, aimed at giving PhD students some helpful background for the talk.
- The Hodge Club is a seminar organized by and for PhD students and postdocs in the Hodge Institute.
- The Fox and Hedgehog is a seminar series which aims to forge closer ties between mathematicians and physicists.
- While we can offer a large community of researchers under one roof, we believe in encouraging you to gain as broad a perspective as possible. The best way to do this is to involve yourself in the international dialogue on your research area, through attending conferences and symposia, and visiting your peers in centres of research worldwide. Throughout your studies, you’ll be given opportunities to travel to events and institutions that will allow you to gain this perspective, and open up new areas of investigation. Edinburgh also benefits in this respect from the constant stream of international conferences and researchers at the International Centre for the Mathematical Sciences, which is based in the Bayes Centre.
- The Piscopia Initiative is an organization of PhD students with strong roots in Edinburgh, which aims to encourage women and non-binary students to pursue a PhD in Mathematics, and creates a support network for students and researchers in Mathematics and related disciplines. The Edinburgh committee are open to being contacted with questions about studying in Edinburgh.
- Here is some more information about studying maths in Edinburgh, and here is information about the support (e.g., health, accommodation, childcare…) offered to all PhD students at the University of Edinburgh.
- Here is a poster featuring recent Hodge alumni.