2021-06-09 | Blog 002

Last few weeks

The last few weeks have been a little tense, I had to give a presentation for my Annual Performance Review yesterday. It's essentially the test to see if I can progress to my second year of my PhD. Thankfully, I passed and am "permitted to register for the next session with no conditions". That said, the examiners did have a few comments which, on face value, sound very serious.

Their main concern was that I haven't formulated the topic of my thesis thoroughly enough for my stage. I think this was a justified comment, the presentation I gave focussed on the papers I have written/am writing rather than the thesis. This gave the impression that I'm doing papers and will string together a PhD out of them, rather than the papers are results of the studying I'm doing for the thesis.

As I say, from the presentation I gave this is a justifiable conclusion. However, I think I did reasonably well to assuage these fears during the Q&A, hence why I can progress without any conditions. I do plan to review my approach and (possibly) put less pressure on producing papers.

In other news I wrote a LinkedIn "article" on the wind turbine modelling, called Simple Technology, Difficult to Model: Six less obvious reasons why modelling wind turbines is hard. I'll link it at the bottom of this page and will post it on my own website in the future.

It's received a fantastic reaction (for me, anyway) with interactions from quite an array of wind engineers and scientists. I'm quite surprised at the reaction as I didn't put that much effort into it. I bashed it out in about 2 sittings, and the diagrams were done quickly on a whiteboard. Compare this to my "QI ANN" post, which took months of work, plus the help of 3(!!!) other people, which received a fraction of the interest...

I'm glad it's done well. I'm keen to write in the same style in the future as it was quite an enjoyable process. Thanks to LinkedIn (and other platforms) giving an estimated read time, short, focussed articles are undoubtedly going to get more clicks.

Rory

Links:

Simple Technology, Difficult to Model: Link to LinkedIn article