Hot and tepid water

Hi guys,

as you noticed I've been writing about my PhD studies. I deliberately decided to use this blog as my notebook with advice for new Phd students or candidates, hopefully to help you out in somehow.

When you start your PhD studies (aside from recognizing that you must be quite crazy :) the first thing that you should realize, it is to update your knowledge about your research topic as soon as it is possible. Fill the existing gap between your current knowledge and the state of work. In other words do what you are supposed to do before writing your paper, check the "related work" and then think out of the box!!

In my city we have a common byword: when you find or propose a well established solution to a problem, we say "you discovered hot water". During these last days I've had many "tepid" ideas that turned to be hot as the water, not extraordinary.

In hopes that my tepid ideas turn into cold ones :) I wish to all PhD students good luck for their careers.

Serendipity-Fate-Destiny

Do you believe in fate?

I sustain this idea, it is quite simple.

Many things happen to us, we run into unanticipated events, people and places...

When this unpredictable situations occur we make a decision whether to pick them or not.

Decisions deliberately made, without a specific crunchy reasons behind them.

Sometimes just a word, a smile, a distraction drive our life towards another direction.

We can barely control our life, definitely.

Serendipity, do you know the movie?

I do believe that this theory mostly applies to love-story,

love should came out easily, no effort to find the "right" person... like the two protagonists of this romantic movie do

Or conversely shall we create our opportunities, encourage ourselves to take another street?

The Legend of 1900 here comes, another movie.

Shall we act like T.D. Lemmons? Accept to live on a ship for ever because scared of

the infinity possibilities that are beyond our sight or take the plunge and go ashore?

Problems

It is not what kind of problems that makes us academicians, but how we manage to sort it out.

How to present your Working package

Dear guys,
As I wrote in my former post, I attended two European meetings last weeks.
One of them gave me a preliminary idea on how to present your working package. Firstly, a kick off meeting is hold, mainly, because the partners need to present their working packages and duties. For the ones not aware of the structure of an European project, they are split into working package (WP).
Each WP represents a "work unit" that encompasses some tasks. The WP is presented by its leader. I prepared the slides for the working package in which was involved my university (but I didn't present it). After the meeting realized that I was neglect on some points. What I learnt and I wish to share with you is:

• Kick off meeting is not only a presentation of your institution and the working package you're charged of.
• Avoid presenting your working packages as a standalone piece, it has interactions with other WPs, find and highlight them.
• Show the potential weak and toughest points, your partners and you might agree on a common strategy to sort them out.
• Propose and discuss solutions, if you already have any in your mind.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have other suggestions.

European meetings

Dear guys,

Last weeks I attended two weeks.The first meeting was two weeks ago in my city. The audience was heterogeneous, exponents coming from both academic and industrial world. The meeting lasted the entire days and several panelists had their talk, some of them were well known professors. This meeting was interesting because I gained a deeper insight about some scientific topics that I ignored or barely knew,

The second meeting held in Rome last Friday was more exciting and with a different focus. It was a kick off meeting that involved all the partners of a consortium.

This fruitful and amenable meeting helped me to understand how different European groups join and work. Indeed the participants were German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, CECIc and... Hungarian :) and they have expertise on different subjects. To tell the true, a kick off meeting is not easy to chair. You have to keep things moving correctly since it's the first meeting you have to establish the roles of the partners. Moreover, these meetings are a viable opportunity to make new partnership,

exchange contacts and ideas. I personally managed to get in touch with two people who might cooperate in the future for some research activities :)

But the best part of any meeting is ... the lunch and coffee break!

You can't miss them.