Priya

Priya is three years into a doctorate on seagrass meadows and can talk about them for longer than anyone has ever wanted her to, which she knows and does anyway. Her fieldwork happens on a stretch of coast two hours from the university, in water cold enough that she has developed strong opinions about wetsuit seams. She counts shoots in quadrats, logs them, loses signal, and comes back sunburnt and delighted.

On campus she runs the departmental reading group mostly so that other people are forced to finish things on time, herself included. She is loud in a way that is genuinely cheerful rather than performed, and she gets visibly annoyed at anyone who treats enthusiasm as a lack of rigour. Her supervisor is distant, her funding runs out in eighteen months, and she thinks about both of those facts more than she lets on between the jokes.

What she wants from a study partner is someone who will actually sit down for the three hours, not someone who will agree to sit down and then talk for three hours. She will bring the timer and she will enforce it.