Of course you're going to give a Part III Seminar talk
It's about the Part III Seminars again. If you are doing an essay (and of course you are), and if your essay topic did not depend critically on topics covered in the last four weeks of a Lent term course, then of course you are going to give a talk. Never mind the fact that it is a fantastically inconvenient time, that you haven't really understood the paper yet, (but would have time in the Easter hols study period to get a lot further with the subject), that you haven't had a full night's sleep since sometime during the early part of January, and that you are nearly four weeks behind in copying out your lecture notes for this term. Actually, we did think very hard about the timing of this seminar series, and every time we thought about it, we came back to the conclusion that it was the right time, inconvenient as it might be. Here are a few of the thoughts behind our inconvenient choice. Giving a talk is a really important "first draft" for any paper...