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Saikiran Tharimena recently got his PhD from the University of Southampton in the UK. Here he tells the story of his journey from South India to Southampton. Read on to find out how he chose what and where to study, what he got out of it, and what he plans for the future. Coming from […]

American physicist Richard Feynman was a genius. Not only did he know a thing or two about science (he won the Nobel Prize in 1965), but as an adult he learned how to speak Japanese, play a Brazilian musical instrument, and how to paint (he even sold some art). One thing he did not know […]

Thanks in part to films such as The Absent-Minded Professor (a Disney classic from 1961), the 1963 film The Nutty Professor (remade in 1996 starring Eddie Murphy, and as an animated version in 2008), and the 1989 film Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams, the eccentric professor has become something of a stereotype. The reality, […]

Mondays – that manmade scourge – are the favorite day of no sane person. People who love Mondays usually fall somewhere between ‘annoyingly enthusiastic’ and ‘mentally disturbed’. The only reasonable response to Mondays is an ill-tempered grunt. So, without further ado, here are a few ways to describe most people on Mondays (unfortunately, some people […]

Between June 6 and June 22, the University of Toronto’s Class of 2017 – nearly 14,000 students – will receive their degrees in one of 27 traditional ceremonies. Not Precilla Veigas. This student from India, who was diagnosed cancer two years ago, had a special convocation ceremony on May 9, because doctors warned her that […]

American teenager Priscilla Samey got into seven Ivy League schools, but couldn’t find a date for the senior prom. Instead of being disheartened, the 17-year-old took her acceptance letter from Harvard University to the dance. Last Saturday, she tweeted this picture with the message, “Couldn’t find a man to accept me for prom so I […]

A good sentence is key to writing a respectable piece of prose – whether it’s a letter, an essay, or a novel. We can entertain ambitions about writing epic novels, or A-grade essays, but, without a good hold on this building block, our ambitions are likely to remain pipe dreams. In this Word Nerd, we […]

To mark #WorldBookDay, the School of Oriental and African Studies asked students, academics, alumni, and friends to suggest their top picks in global literature. The response was fantastic. While SOAS received hundreds of nominations on Facebook, Twitter and their blog, they narrowed the list to 50. The list is enough to keep readers going for […]

For some reason, some people think that the harder something is to read, the smarter it must be. But a long word or a complex sentence is not necessarily more effective than a short word or a simple sentence. Indeed, the opposite is often true.  We have discussed before why verbosity is a terrible way […]

Recently, someone asked on Quora, “What has been your strangest experience with a teacher. Many stories followed, including a few disturbing ones. Our favorite was this one, contributed by someone named Annie Howard: When I was studying for GCSE French, our teacher had some very odd ideas: He gave people nicknames based on their names […]