When I arrived in Sheffield, the plan was to do a new route PhD. What this entailed was one year of taught MSc, and then full independent research. On the side, I started writing for Forge, the student newspaper, and Fuse, the entertainment and arts supplement.

My first articles never went to print, and I understood that, it was the first time I was writing for someone else, and strict guidelines and deadlines, my worst enemy, are set in stone. I had to abide by that. I had direct editors, Pippa and Rucki, who were extremely helpful in becoming a better writer.

It’s not a lie to say I focused more on writing than on my own MSc. In the end, I already had an MSc from Nottingham, and a lot of the topics overlapped, so I wiggled my way out of some bad situations, and in others, I paid the price of my own hubris.

Things got complicated on the January/May part of the MSc, as labwork became intense, and the only one homework discipline of the University of Sheffield back then made it a “you can’t miss!” situation, which became really complicated for my slacker, lackadaisical approach to work. It’s the problem when you’re bright: you can become a lazy bastard, and you pay the consequences by being sloppy, delivering not your best work. Shame, as many assignments were clever and required a lot of brain power to solve. I still managed to get an MSc, despite myself.

I took a few days to gather information and “leave it for Sam of the future” to peruse and discern. That meant that the day before the assignment, which required at least a week of constant work, I would start working around 7 or 8 am, non-stop, barely eating, just furiously typing, doing excel, getting the odd graph out, typing again, cursing myself, and listening to the same song again and again.

There was this assignment that required looking into fractured soils and petrol leaks. I think it was a case from Wolverhampton. My printer went on the fritz around 3:30 AM and it was due at 8 AM. I scrambled back to school to the Information Commons, smelling like a rubbish tip, hungry, panicking, crying on the way down. “Are these the consequences of my acts?” I asked myself, fully on gallows’ humour, promising myself I wouldn’t do it again.

Hey, it’s Sam from 2026, I did it again. Several times. Whoops.

As I furiously edited my work and started printing the 30+ pages final report, a song came on my iPod. People in Planes. “Mayday, mayday, save me because I’m a danger to myself” pleaded Gareth Jones. I only had missed them playing live in Sheffield, but I promised myself to catch them the next time.

There wasn’t a next time, as they broke up.

I got a pass on my paper. Ryan, one of the teachers, and soon to be my tutor during the PhD, commented one day during field work that I had good ideas on my writing. He even said he learned something new on a paper I delivered on remediation techniques, where the use of chitosan helped remediate lead and cadmium pollution. Ryan was a cool dude, but he did rage-quit Uni of Sheffield a year later.

I suppose we all have a breaking point. I had one with deadlines, both for the masters and for the newspaper. Ryan got fed up of many issues in the UK. People in Planes just broke up. Still, Mayday (M’aidez) brings me back to those early spring days, running under smelly trees, high pollen alerts, fields of daffodils, and a nascent love of writing.

-Sam J. Valdés López