Tag: work

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diary general announcement

Hiatus

Happy New Year and Good Health

As much as 2022 started with good vibes (covid seemed behind us, starting the blog, new projects…), the giddy feelings all came to an abrupt end in February. An unfortunate accident with my bicycle on the way to work resulted in a badly broken elbow and, a couple of weeks later, the world woke up to the abject invasion of Ukraine. The good year wishes didn’t last very long, did it?

Life Goes On and Has So Much to Offer

Nevertheless, obstacles remain just that; obstacles. We stumble on them but we get back up, learn from them, and push forward. After a mentally costly surgery, my arm is on the path of full recovery and mental health keeps its steady ascension from the gloom of 2020.

I am now back on the daily blog and have so many projects to start, share, and thrive on. 2022 may have stumbled a bit in this first quarter but there is so much more to live for; I’m very excited about what’s coming 😀

Closing Words

So, how has the beginning of 2022 been treating you? Any topics you would like to see covered here?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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diary

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

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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diary

Marking in Progress

This is going to be a short post as it’s already late and tomorrow will be a long day as well.

This Part of the Education Cycle

Marking constitutes an inherent part of any teaching job, as much as exams are an inherent part of any students’ journey.

Exams are dreaded by students for the stress during the examination and the release (and consequences) of the resulting marks. Teachers also have to put a lot of efforts (aka time) into writing exam questions. Once the examination completed, the teachers will also spend a significant amount of time marking all these exam transcripts.

All in all, we all have to commit to exam and marking.

A Love Hate Relationship

I’m sure this is a feeling shared by many colleagues, but I’ve have a love-hate relationships with exams.

I like examining my students to measure (relatively quantitatively) how they have grown as skilled engineers. However, the volume of marking (easily 30min per transcripts and hundreds of them to mark) makes it a very daunting task…

To help me motivate myself to even start each mini marking sessions (it is unrealistic to mark everything at once), I usually keep picturing the curious and engaging students I have so much enjoying sharing knowledge and interacting during the course. Even if the transcripts are anonymous (which is an essential aspect of marking), my mind remains curious about how closer to a full engineer these students have become.

This means that I need to examine them. This means that I need to mark…

Closing Words

How do you tackle marking? Do you have any suggestions?

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow.

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diary

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.