Coming into the research year of my Masters, I was full of uncertainty. If I was either naturally talented or highly motivated - preferably both, as it seems the scientists that surround me are - I knew that I could do it, could become a true scientist. For the previous six months or so I hadn't felt either.

I love programming. There is little more satisfying than watching your hard-written program cascade into reality. It's the closest I've ever come to feeling like a god. However, this rarely - perhaps never - happens on the first try. I present the following as an example of the numerous frustrations that can encumber scientific research.

My name is Lachlan Marnoch, and I have just begun a PhD - the degree of a Doctor of Philosophy, an antiquated title from back when philosophy was anything that involved deep thinking about any topic. The specific flavour of thinking which I’ll be doing is on astrophysics. What that means is that I will use physics to try and make sense of information from the night sky. As with my Masters, I’ll be studying fast radio bursts - very brief, very mysterious bursts of radio waves originating from other galaxies. They’re pretty fascinating, and I’ll get to explaining more about them soon.