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One More Week of Daily Writing and Ideas

‘Challenge Must Go On’

After the first three weeks of publishing a new blogpost every day, this is what I’ve learned.

First of all, the daily grind of writing daily gets easier, but unlikely to become second nature. This is so far falling within expectations. The grind comes from fearing the writing process and the inherent writing block. As stated in the very first blogpost, the motive for starting this challenge was to learn to overcome this writer block. At this stage, I confirm that writing these blogposts is getting easier in comparison to the very first few ones. Ideas are flowing faster and in greater number. Sentences are forming in my head with less friction.

Furthermore and similarly to any skills, this is unlikely to become pain-free and the dread to write will not disappear, however smaller it becomes. This is both anticipated and in a sense welcomed. Part of what makes experiences enjoyable lies in the efforts that one pays to ripe the rewards. Like in a rollercoaster or climbing a mountain, the joy at the end is fueled by the fear or the sweat (or both ;p) in performing any of these activities.

Another side-effect consists in a lowering of my fear to share out more openly my thoughts and its positive impact on my stress level. A facet of my burn out stems from the harsh job environment of academia where written work (e.g. papers, proposals, reports, lecture notes, tutorials) are heavily criticized through their related review process. This had a massive negative impact on my mental state, already weakened by numerous bad personal and professional events. Some took place over a defined periods of time in the past and scared me till now to the point of more easily triggering burns out now. This is a point the work my therapist and I have been focusing on for the last year and we’ve made good progress on. I appreciate that very few of you are reading these blogposts as of now but releasing them combined with sharing them openly on this blog has tremendously eased the weight on my mind about my ability to write and share ideas. So thank you, the internet.

I thus shall continue to this writing challenge for all this above virtues and more.

‘Blog Will Rock You’

When scared about losing ideas to others, then one good advice surprisingly consists in sharing these ideas, as many more will start flowing; this writing challenge is no exception.

The more blogposts I write, the more ideas are coming to my head; at first during the writing sessions, then little by little throughout the day (please let me sleep at night). The first type of ideas consists of themes to write about in future posts. The second consists of future projects for this blog and general website. The third type is about the methods of sharing these ideas. The first two are self-explanatory and you will most likely see these ideas concretised in near-future blogposts or webpages.

The third type is however more subtle to describe. As much as I stated above that sharing these blogposts in the open on the internet has almost a therapeutic positive impact on my mental health, I also acknowledge that this blog is pretty hard to find and most likely (as confirmed by the website’s statistics) these posts are hardly read. This is the point I’m slowly warming up to improve by gathering the courage to share or advertise these posts more widely, especially on social media (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn). The objective is to gather more views and learn more and faster through exchanging comments with other readers. This can read at first as a contradiction to the point stated at the beginning of this post about how reviews badly impacted me. Rather than that, my view is rather that my mental health has been slowly regenerating through this writing challenge and is now ready to rise to the bigger challenge again.

There are also many other projects about creating a podcast about power electronics knowledge, a YouTube channel about modelling and control, a GitHub repository about open-source projects… You will hear more when these ideas will have more matured.

So, watch that space for more (grand and wider) announcements!

Closing Words

How has your reading experience on this daily blog been so far? Do you have any features or topics you would like me to cover?

For some reasons, the songs of the late Freddie Mercury resonated in my head while writing this blogpost. Did you catch their influence on the section names? ;p

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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diary Teaching

Asking questions at Presentations (Part 3)

We discussed about how to generate questions when attending a presentation in Part 1 and Part 2. If you haven’t read this previous blogposts or need a refresher, click on the link.

Preparation On Both Sides

While preparing for the previous blogposts, I stumbled across several sources, all of them focusing on which questions to prepare for when presenting.

At first, I was focused on extracting the common pieces of information for the opposite side, aka preparing questions as the audience. Now that this has been discussed in Part 2 (and most likely in the future as I refine the Endless Question Generator), I thought about revisiting these sources and summarise the questions you definitely need to prepare as a presenter.

So let’s see what those questions are.

Questions Recommended to Prepare for

As the Endless Question Generator showed, there is a certain structure to the vast majority of questions you may face as a presenter. As indicated on some sources (https://tressacademic.com/audience-questions/), there are some questions you should prepare the answer for as they are likely to be asked.

  • What was the point? Remind the audience about the key points of your presentation and the reason it might interest them.
  • What’s next? Indicate what you intent to work on next, showcasing how live this project is.
  • How have you done this? This is asking for clarification on the methodology you followed in your work. Clarify it.
  • What do you mean by this? This is more a definition issue. Make sure that all terms are adequately chosen and clear for the intended use.

The best remains to rehearse your presentation with a colleague (or at least record yourself). I’m sure you’ll do well in your presentation.

Closing Words

And which questions do you usually prepare for or have faced in your experience?

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.

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Starting a New Side-Project

In the Look for New Posting Theme

With this blog going on for more than two weeks already, I thought to start another series, more technical.

Don’t get me wrong, I will carry on the daily blog, using ideas popping up during the day. After all this website is about presenting myself in a more open way rather than only through the prism of ideal image. However, I would also like to share about (interesting) projects that I work on.

In a sense, this aligns with the original purpose of this website, publishing and sharing about my work.

A Teaching Project

My teaching revolves around power engineering and control, and I’m always looking for ideas to improve the student’s experience and learning.

One of the effective teaching medium remains experimentation. The ability to test an assumption by yourself and observing the impact of our actions constitutes one of the most powerful learning tool. For this reason, engineering studies rely a lot on laboratories to teach engineering concepts.

They remain however very challenging to design since the right balance between difficulty, freedom to explore, and resource limits must be found. Missing the right mark often leads to the lab becoming ineffective, or even a waste of time. Make the objective of the lab too hard and the students will run out of time before learning much / Make it too easy and the intended new notion will feel too trivial to be learned. Write the lab assignment like a very precise recipe book and the students will just memorise the steps without developping the intended skills / Write it too loosely and the students (and even the demonstrators) will be completely lost. Use too much resources (e.g. purchasing expansive equipments or using too much staff time to design a tailored rig) will render the lab impractical to both create and maintain / Use too little resources and it will look too simple to be taken seriously.

I won’t claim to have cracked this balance, in fact far from it, but I’m keen to explore.

A Low-Voltage Motor Control Rig

The objective of this project consists in design a simple experiment to teach student about advanced motor control.

The characteristics of this rig must include:

  • Simple to design, build, and maintain
  • Safe to use by inexperienced users
  • Allows enough freedom to explore

Solutions to the above requirements could be:

  • Use off-the-shelf items from established companies, e.g. TI, Trinamic, Arduino
  • Focus on low-voltage (<50V) solutions
  • Use high-level programming language, e.g. Matlab or C/C++

This is a starting list. Let’s keep thinking and hopefully I will share an update on this project.

Closing Words

What do you think of this type of content for this blog? Do you have any suggestions for this project?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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Leadership vs Expertise

An Interesting Story

Today, I stumbled across this thread on Twitter from Peter Reinhardt. In this thread, he recall an experience as CEO of Segment during its growth period.

The premice of this story lies in the fact that the rapid growth of this start-up was stalling and, given its short existence, it would soon become threatening to the future of the company itself. Customers were being attracted by competitors’ solutions, their product was starting to lag behind the competition, and the team was getting demoralized. Peter, the CEO, had a feeling that the ship was heavily taking water and the point of no-return was nearing.

Then came the electric shock in terms of a frank discussion between him and another employee: the staff was inefficient at their job because they didn’t know what they should work for! This came as a shock to the CEO as he thought the mission of the company was clear to everyone, and each employee already knew what to do. It turned out that it was actually quite the opposite and he was almost the only one who know which problems needed their attention, let alone knowing how to solve them.

Summoning everyone into an honest all-staff meeting, he exposed the problems he saw as being the important ones, without knowing how to pull it off on time to save the company. This had the effect of clarifying the situation to all the staff and this newly gained sense of clarity subsequently motivated everyone to find effective solutions to the real problems that the company was facing. This turned out to be a success (suvivor bias?) and Segment has been thriving since then.

Peter explains this by the fact that his was trained as a programmer, aka a problem solver, who thrived at solving problem by himself and only sharing the solution. Instead, what he needed to do instead as a CEO was to identify and clearly explain to his team what the problems are and let them figure those out by themselves.

I invite you read the Twitter thread by yourself to get more details and insights from Peter himself.

Parallel with Academic Life

This story and its conclusion somehow resonated with me as this is a concept that I’m still battling in my academic job.

On one hand, the academic training (PhD then PostDoc then junior Lecturer) heavily emphasises on the individual training, booster-rocketing the future Principal Investigator (PI) into the expertise stardom in a (narrow) topic. The main if not only human resource is the researcher themselves and they have to come with solutions, then report them confirmed as the solution for the stated problem. Yet, when it comes to actually creating and sustaining a research team, the PI should be the last resource used to actually find and implement the solution since their time is so valuable (writing lecture material, managing courses, interacting with students, taming their emailbox 🙁 supervising student projects, writing research proposals, creating research contacts, surviving and running the university admin, repleneshing the coffee machine…). Like the CEO of Segment at the time, the PIs should instead focus on identifying the important and relevant problems (i.e. research questions), communicate these clearly to their research team and let them work on it!

This is often frustrating as we are often drawn into this advanced technical world by the technique itself. I’ve been personnaly drawn into engineering to learn how systems work and design/build them according to my problem solving skills. However, I acknowledge that I no longer have had the time for many years already to do everything myself and just delegating tasks is not sufficient, nor effective either.

Maybe this is a concept I need to implement as well.

Closing Words

And what do you take out of this story? How do you think academics could be running their mini-company which is their research group? Is there another academic or research model out there?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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diary Teaching

Asking Questions At Presentations (part 2)

Forewords: this blogpost constitutes the continuation of this Part 1 on ‘Asking Questions at Presentations’. Feel free to read this introductory post first, which covers the motivation for these posts.

Shall I Dare to Ask?

First of all, there is no stupid question.

If something is obvious, it means that either the presentation or its context wasn’t explained clearly enough. Presentaterw assume a certain background from their audience and this can be often miscommunicated. A question about what may seem an obvious contextual point may in fact reveal a deeper misunderstanding by either the rest of the audience or the presenter themselves.

Furthermore, presenters are often way more stressed than their audience. Questions about their presentation is thus received as a confirmation that their presentation capture the attention of audience, transforming their ordeal into a worthwhile experience. You never know, a good question may even serve as an effective icebreaker for later conversation off the stage.

So take your chance!

But What to Ask?

Similarly to a lot of skills, training makes the answer to this question eventually more obvious.

The trick is to keep asking questions at every occasions (like my colleague suggested in Part 1) by using some box-standard questions like “Why have you chosen this methodology?” or “What is next in this project?”. Eventually, your ability to ask questions will sharpen and find more advanced and tailored questions to ask. Again the key message remains that, by aiming to ask at least one question, your attention to the content of the presentation is innatly enhanced and details or patterns will more naturally emerge.

But let’s see if I can help you with some starter questions first.

Looking for a Idea Generator

While searching for resources on online writing, I came across this very interesting concept: ‘the Endless Idea Generator’ (see picture below) from Ship30for30; a 30-day writing challenge with loads of tips about online writing. You can either follow their Twitter account or subscribe to their free newsletter from their website.

The Endless Idea Generator by Ship30for30 including the three categories: What do you want to write about?, proven approach, and credibility.
The Endless Idea Generator by Ship30for30 (https://www.ship30for30.com/)

The neat concept here consists in mixing three categories: “What do you want to write about?”, “Proven approach”, and “Credibility”. As much as this is not going to make you win a Pullitzer prize, this is definitely a great starting point, especially when you are short on ideas or facing the dreaded writer’s block.

So this inspired me to create a similar framework about asking questions at presentations.

The Endless Question Generator

This framework (see picture below) aims to help in creating your first questions when none are coming to your mind in time.

The Endless Question Generator

You start with the classic five W-questions: What, Where, When, Why, hoW. The ‘What‘ question focuses on a detail of the presentation. The ‘Where‘ and ‘When‘ point towards location in space or time. The ‘Why‘ questions motivations and reasoning. The ‘How‘ is often associated with methodology.

Then you choose a Context or Theme. You could ask about the motives of the work, whether they are internal or external, or based on a starting point or end goal. Another theme revolves around the potential applications of this project; if they puzzle you or you have an idea about one, then enquire the presenter. Presentations also include a lot of definitions, sometimes clearly mentioned, often implied. If a term or concept is not clear to you, ask! Most likely half of the audience didn’t understand it either. Furthermore, if you know of similar works, you can ask for the viewpoint of the presenter about how they compare. Moreover, a project often uses data and a methodology to arrive at results or products, both of these points can be questionned either for their validity or how they have been chosen / implemented. Finally, you can enquire about the outcomes and what comes after this project. It can be in the form of future works after this project or the lessons learnt from this study.

Finally, your question can be angled with a reason of why you are asking it in the first place. These can range from the simplest reason where you need a clarification on a point mentioned (or not) during the presentation to sharing your knowledge on a similar work and wish to get the take from the presenter. A presentation may make sense on its own but could be hard to contextualise it in the wider context of how it connects with either other ongoing projects or its own start/end points. The methodology and results are always endless sources of (heated) discussions about which one is the most appropriate or the impact on the results one would get from the data or its influence on the collected data itself.

Remember, that preparing your questions (whether from this template or tailored to the presentation) will always pay off. So read about the presenter and advertised content beforehand, and pay attention to both the details and the big picture during the presentation. All these points will make you a better audience and position you in a better light with the presenter (or worse light if you intend to be controversial!), potentially leading to cooperation and more idea sharing.

Examples

  • [What/motivation/clarification] What motivated you to start this project?
  • [Why/definition/similar project] Why did you decide to define this term in this way when another project did it another way?
  • [Where/data acquisition/cooperation] Where did you acquire this data? We would like to use the same data, please.
  • [Who/future works/contextualise] Who will benefit from the outcome of this work?
  • [How/lesson learnt/clarification] How are you going to disseminate the learning from this project?

As you can see, there are an endless list of questions, which can be generated from this framework.

Going Further

Eventually, after training numerous times with this framework, you should be able to come up with your own questions; possibly graduating beyond the W-questions into W-less questions such as “Have you considered comparing your results with this particular study since the correlation A with B is less obvious here given that condition C is not longer present?”.

I’ve tried this fact sheet with project students during our weekly meeting and it turned out to be quite successful. This obvious still requires quite a bit of tuning, especially as this blogpost illustrates a sustantial amount of explanation is still needed beyond this simple picture. I’ll most likely post a Part 3 of this series when this framework reaches significant updates.

Closing Words

This post managed to start the creation of this guide on ‘Asking questions at a presentation’ by providing a framework on ‘which question to ask’. I will continue to experiment with this guide and come back here with updates.

Do you have any suggestions? Do you plan to use this question generator? If so, what was your experience? I’m looking forward to your feedbacks.

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.