Month: January 2019

Going Part-time…

Rebecca Couchman-CrookLeave a comment

Email: r.f.couchman-crook@pgr.reading.ac.uk

**Scroll to the bottom for picture of a bearded dragon.**

A full-time PhD is not always what you see yourself doing. Perhaps you don’t like the idea of being an academic, going through the realities of post-doc life, and battling for the few research roles out there. Maybe you want to get a job in industry, but keep your hand in the research pool. Maybe you have other commitments, meaning that your time is limited but you want to still learn and build your research skills. Whatever the reason, there is always an option to go part-time.

After doing a year and a bit full-time, I knew I wanted to work outside of academia in something more practical than an office-based PhD. Wanting to make use of the work I’d already started, myself, my supervisors and my funders agreed that a part-time MPhil gave the outcomes that all parties wanted. It means I can finish my studies sooner and have something tangible for the years of study, but it also provides new research into my topic that can be used by subsequent researchers.

But how to broach the subject in the first place? You need to take a bit of time to look at the reasons why you want to change, but not so long that you end up regretting never actually saying how you’re feeling at least. It’s really important at this stage that you assess your options, and think about the practicalities, like how it will affect your funding.

It is important to work out how your new schedule will fit together. Part-time doesn’t mean a few hours a week, it means half of what a full-time PhD student would do. With my hours, it means I do 12 hours a week and then work during school holidays. Realistically I won’t get much time off, but it is workable into a roughly 8-6 schedule. It’s important to keep your weekends as free as possible, because social time will help keen you sane!

And in terms of touching base with your supervisor, for me that means coming in once a fortnight, and keeping a record of everything I’ve been up to each day, so I know exactly where I am on my project objectives. You and your supervisor need to be realistic about how much you can complete in a given time, and that your work won’t happen as quickly, so regulating expectations is important. And if things aren’t working, then it’s important to look at them again, perhaps with the help of your Monitoring Committee, to keep you on top of your work.

It’s also important to learn to say no – anyone who knows me knows I struggle with this! People might be under the impression that you have more time to take on other stuff now that you’re part-time, but you have to know what you can make time for in your schedule (like writing a short blog), what might bring other benefits (little bit of open day volunteering), and what really isn’t your problem to worry about!

Having gone part-time, a lot of the stresses seem to have relaxed; it’s nice to not feel like the PhD is all-consuming, and I’m finding it easier to manage my targets each fortnight. If anything, knowing I only have a limited window for work seems to increase productivity! And my job as a lab technician now means I’m gaining a whole other range of skills, can leave that work at work, and make friends with a whole host of school reptiles!

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My tips, strategies and hacks as a PhD student

Mark ProsserLeave a comment

Email: m.prosser@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Having been a PhD student for a little over 3 months I am perhaps ill-qualified to write such a ‘PhD tips’ type of blog post, but write one I appear to be doing! It’s probably actually more accurately titled ‘study tips in general but ones which are highly relevant to science PhDs.’

The following are just my tips on what have helped me over the course of my studies and may be obvious or not suitable for others, but I write them on the off-chance that something here is useful to someone out there. No doubt I will have many more such strategies by the end of my time here in Reading!

Papers and articles
As a science student you may have encountered these from time to time. The better ones are clearly written and succinct, the worse ones are verbose and obscurantist. If you’re not the quickest reader in the world, getting through papers can end up consuming a great deal of your time.

I’m going to advocate speed reading in a bit but when you start learning speed reading, one of the things they ask you to think about first is “Do I really need to read this?”. If the answer is yes, then the next question is “Do I really need to read all of it?”. Perhaps you only need to glance at just the abstract, figures and conclusion? After all, time spent reading this is time not spent doing something else, something more profitable perhaps, so do check that it really is worth your time before diving in.

So once I’ve ascertained that the article is indeed worth my time, I sit down with a pencil (or the equivalent for a PDF) and read through the sections I’ve decided on. Anything that makes my neurons spike (“oh that’s interesting….”), I underline or highlight. Any thoughts or questions that occur to me, I write in the margin. If I feel the need to criticise the paper for being insufficiently clear then I write down these remarks, too.

Once I get to the end, I put the article away out of sight and sit down with a blank piece of paper (or on a computer) and try and write something very informally about what I’ve just read. Quite often my mind will go helpfully blank at this point, so I try and finish the following sentence: “The biggest thing (if anything) I learned from this article was….”. Completing this one sentence then tends to lead to other stuff tumbling out and in no particular order I jot these all down. Only once the majority of it is down on paper do I take a peek at the annotated piece to see what I missed (For heaven’s sake avoid painting the article yellow with a highlighter!)

Please, please, please, don’t.

This personal blurb that you have produced is then a good way to quickly remind yourself of the contents of that article in the future without having to reread it from scratch. This post-reading exercise need not take more than 15 minutes but if you’re worried about spending this extra time, don’t be. You’ll save yourself a heap of time in future by not having to reread the damn thing.

Random piece of advice – if you are unaware of the Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences, then check it out. Whatever your PhD topic I guarantee there’ll be 10 or so shortish entries which are all highly relevant to your particular PhD topic and consequently worth knowing about!

Speed reading
Really still on the previous paragraph but as is often the way, between the valuable articles that you really should be reading and the stuff for which life’s really too short there’s a grey area.
For such grey areas I am an advocate of speed reading.
For any electronic texts check out this free website:

Just copy, paste and go! https://accelareader.com/

The pace the words flash up doesn’t have to be particularly fast (I suggest trying 300 wpm to start with) but the golden rule is to never press pause once you’ve started. No going back to read stuff you’ve missed (well not until you’ve reached the end first at least!). This method of reading is especially useful for any articles that feel like quagmires into which you are slowly drowning. Paradoxically reading faster in such instances often increases one’s comprehension.

A good way to develop the skill of speed reading is to start on articles you see posted on social media, articles that you are not too fussed about getting every single detail. Just let it wash over you!

Talks and lectures
I have found it useful to make audio recordings of these. I don’t usually tend to listen back, but if there is something that was particularly interesting or dense that might be worth revisiting then it can be very worthwhile. I make a note of the time this something was said at the time it was said and can thus track it down in the recording fairly painlessly afterwards.

One tip about note taking that has stayed with me since I first heard it several years back was the following: after writing down the title, only make notes on what is surprising or interesting to you, just that! This may result in many lines of notes or no lines at all, but whatever you do, don’t just make notes of everything that was said. This advice has been very useful for me.

Organising
Ask me in person if you would like to know my thoughts on this.

Programming to help physical intuition.
This is probably more relevant to students like me who didn’t come from a maths or physics undergrad and consequently aren’t quite as fluent in the old maths….or perhaps undergrads for that matter…
….but in my undergrad (environmental science) I spent quite a lot of the time spent studying maths (and to a lesser extent) physics involved memorising complicated procedures. The best example of this was a lecture on Fourier Series where the professor took the whole hour to work through the process of getting from an input (x^2) to the output (first n terms of the Fourier series). Because it took so much space/effort for me to remember this lengthy process, it ended up crowding out the arguably more important conceptual stuff, such as what a Fourier series actually does and why it is it so useful. When all is said and done and the final exam is handed in, these concepts are what should (ideally) stick with you even if the details of how, don’t.
So here’s where I think programming can come in. Firstly, there’s nothing like coding up some process to check whether you understand the nuts and bolts of it, but more importantly once it has been coded up properly you can then play about with the inputs to see how these affect the graphed outputs. Being able to ‘play’ about like this gives you a more intuitive feel for the model/process that wouldn’t be possible if you had to manually redo the laborious calculations each time you wanted to change the input parameters. 3 examples of where I have done this myself are the following:
1. Getting my head around the thermal inertia of the oceans by varying the depth of the surface and deep layer of the ocean in a simple model.
2. Playing around graphically with dispersion.
3. Convincing myself that it really is true that in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere summer the north pole receives more energy per day than the equator.

And you?
So do you have any hard won study/research tips? If so do email me as I would be interested in hearing about them!
Which study hack do you think I (or others) are most lacking?

AMS Annual Meeting 2019

Lewis BlunnLeave a comment

Email: l.p.blunn@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Between 6th-10th January 2019 I was fortunate enough to attend the 99th American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting in their centennial year. It was hosted in the Phoenix, Arizona Convention Center – its vast size was a necessity, seeing as there were 2300 oral presentations and 1100 poster presentations given in 460 sessions! The conferences and symposia covered a wide range of topics such as space weather, hydrology, atmospheric chemistry, climate, meteorological observations and instrumentation, tropical cyclones, monsoons and mesoscale meteorology.

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Me outside one half of Phoenix Convention Center.

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1500 people at the awards banquet.

The theme of this year’s meeting was “Understanding and Building Resilience to Extreme Events by Being Interdisciplinary, International, and Inclusive”. The cost of extreme events has been shown by reinsurance companies to have increased monotonically, with estimated costs for 2017 of $306 billion and 350 lives in the US. Marcia McNutt, President of the National Academy of Science (NAS), gave a town hall talk on the continued importance of evidence-based science in society (view recording). She says that NAS must become more agile at giving advice since the timescales of, for example, hurricanes and poor air quality episodes are very short, but the problems are very complex. There is reason for optimism though, as the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is Kelvin Droegemeier, a meteorologist who formerly served as Vice President for Research at the University of Oklahoma.

“Building Resilience to Extreme Events” took on another meaning with the federal shutdown and proved to be the main talking point of this year’s annual meeting. Over 500 people from federally funded organisations such as NOAA could not attend. David Goldston, director of the MIT Washington Office, gave a talk at the presidential forum entitled “Building Resilience to Extreme Political Weather: Advice for Unpredictable Times” (view recording). He made the analogy of both current US political attitude towards climate change and the federal shutdown as being ‘weather’, and thought that politics would return to long-term ‘climate’. He advised scientists to present their facts in a way understandable to public and government, prepare policy proposals, and be clear on why they are not biased. He reassured scientists by saying they have outstanding public support with 76% of the public thinking scientists act in their best interest. During the talk questions were sourced from the audience and could be voted on. The frustration of US scientists with the government was evidently large.

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Questions put forward by the audience and associated votes during Goldston’s talk.

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Ross Herbert (a PDRA in the Reading Meteorology Department) letting his feelings on the federal shutdown be known at the University of Oklahoma after-party.

A growing area of research is artificial and computational intelligence which had its own dedicated conference. As an early career researcher in urban and boundary layer meteorology I was interested to see a talk on “Surface Layer Flux Machine Learning Parametrisations”. By obtaining training data from observational towers it may be possible to improve upon Monin-Obukhov similarity theory in heterogeneous conditions. At the atmospheric chemistry and aerosol keynote talk by Zhanqing Li I learnt that anthropogenic emissions of aerosol can cause a feedback leading to elevated concentration of pollutants. Aerosol reduces solar radiation reaching the surface leading to less turbulence and therefore lower boundary layer height. It also causes warming at the top of the boundary layer creating a stronger capping inversion which inhibits ventilation. Anthropogenic aerosols are not just important for air quality. They affect global warming via their influence on the radiation budget and can lead to more extreme weather through enhancing deep convection.

I particularly enjoyed the poster sessions since they enabled networking with many scientists working in my area. On the first day I bumped into several Reading meteorology undergraduates on their year long exchange at the University of Oklahoma. Like me, I think they were amazed by the scale of the conference and the number of opportunities available as a meteorologist. The exhibition had over 100 organisations showcasing a wide range of products, publications and services. Anemoment (producers of lightweight, compact 3D ultrasonic anemometers) and the University of Oklahoma had stalls showing how instruments attached to drones can be used to profile the boundary layer. This has numerous possible applications such as air quality monitoring and analysing boundary layer dynamics.

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The exhibition (left is a Lockheed-Martin satellite)

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3rd year Reading meteorology undergraduates at the poster session.

Overall, I found the conference very motivating since it reinforced the sense that I have a fantastic opportunity to contribute to an exciting and important area of science. Next year’s annual meeting is the hundredth and will be held in Boston.