RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

Nearly two weeks ago, I handed in my PhD after five years within the CDT. The experience has been so varied both in activities and the things that life has thrown at me since I began. Overall, it has been a good experience with some difficult points, but I feel so relieved to and proud to have got here. The day before I handed in I had to work on writing my acknowledgements. In my head, this signified that the journey was coming to an end and allowed me to reflect along the whole process. Writing those acknowledgements made me realise how much I have needed my friendships in order to get to the finish line. It made it clear how much I have relied on this form of support along this journey and how thankful I was for this. PhDs can often passion projects. Many people pour their time, effort, frustrations, tears, and a lot else into their thesis. This was very much the case for me and at times, I felt like the thesis could swallow me whole. At other points it was frustrating or draining.

S tudents from our 2021 cohort recently enjoyed their viva session in which they had the opportunity to present their summer project and officially mark the end of the taught component of their course and embark on the research phase. This viva session is always a highlight for us and this year was no exception. The variety of talks was inspiring and there were some superb presentations, with speakers delivering their talks in a calm, measured style!  Below, we hear from some of the 2021 cohort who have written a short article about their first year experience and the move to the research phase of their PhD: Cherry Jackson Introduction Having now completed the first year of a PhD through Royal Holloway's CDT, it is hard to fathom how most PhD students just simply throw themselves into the choppy waters of academia. The first year provided a flotation device. Without the opportunity to dip a toe into the programme, gather my bearings and try out different routes, I suspect I would

As a cohort of 13 students , the first few weeks of entering the CDT have been hectic but immensely fascinating. We all came into the CDT for different but related reasons. Evidently, we all have a strong interest in cybersecurity, but the focus of that interest really varies. Some of us have an interest in the social and political elements of cybersecurity, whereas others thrive on theoretical and applied cryptographic questions, malware analysis, and systems design. While in a standard 3-year PhD our interests may intersect and overlap in passing, the structure of the CDT allows for us to directly confront and take on each other’s strengths, thus changing the way that we will likely see our own research methods and interests in the future. For example, social scientists in the cohort get to benefit from the complex knowledge bases of the more technically minded researchers, and the more technically minded researchers get to explore the expanded toolkit of methods and research framewo