Author: Hannah Gough

Managing your supervisor

Hannah Gough1 Comment

Written by: h.l.gough@pgr.reading.ac.uk

You’re going to be working with them for a while. Supervisors, like projects, are all unique and have their own ways of working. Lots of us have banded together to give tips and advice on how to ‘manage your supervisor’ and by that we mean make the road towards a PhD a little bit easier.

For those of you looking to start a PhD, getting the right match between you and a supervisor is key. PhDs are already stressful enough without a strained supervisor-student relationship.

Know how they work

Supervisors all work differently. Some will leave you to wander for a bit before drawing you back to the point, and others will provide a map of where you’re going. There’s no right or wrong but sometimes their methods can get frustrating when you start comparing supervisors.

Find out the best way to contact them. Some never reply to email and others are never in the office or dislike being disturbed. Figure out between you and your supervisor the best way of getting in contact.

Personal and work balance

Some supervisors are happy to talk about personal problems. Others aren’t. Again, neither option is right or wrong, but it’s something you have to be aware of.

Ask for things

A PhD is intended as a personal development training programme and not just for writing a thesis and publishing papers. Don’t be afraid to ask to do something different, such as environment-Yes, internships, field work and summer schools to name a few.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Manage expectations

Saying yes to all the work they give you is only going to lead to disappointment for them and you. Be honest with the amount of work you can do, and say when you’re having a bad week. They’ll understand. Say when you’ve got enough on your plate already.

Know how long they take to read things, otherwise you’ll end up disappointed when the feedback you expected on a certain day doesn’t arrive.

Don’t expect them to be on email 24/7. Likewise, let them know that you’re not going to be checking emails at 3am either.

Know their style and expertise

Some come across more critical than others, some highlight the good as well as the bad. Their subject may make them biased on certain topics. Knowing their expertise allows you to tailor questions for them.

This is a lot more relevant to people with multiple supervisors, as often you can get two conflicting opinions and have no idea which one to accept. This happens, and it does teach you some diplomacy skills, but don’t go picking sides.

Get advice from other students

Chances are, other students will be supervised by your supervisor. Ask them for hints and tips of how they work. Ask about pitfalls to avoid and helpful tips. They might even have a manual on how to deal with them! There is a camaraderie between people who share the same supervisor!

If you’re still stuck and doing a PhD at Reading University, there’s an RRDP course by the graduate school called managing your supervisor. Definitely worth going to.

Understanding the urban environment and its effect on indoor air.

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Email: h.l.gough@pgr.reading.ac.uk

Recent estimates by the United Nations (2009) state that 50 to 70 % of the world’s population now live in urban areas with over 70 % of our time being spent indoors, whether that’s at work, at home or commuting.

We’ve all experienced a poor indoor environment, whether it’s the stuffy office that makes you sleepy, or the air conditioning unit that causes the one person under it to freeze. Poor environments make you unproductive and research is beginning to suggest that they can make you ill. The thing is, the microclimate around one person is complex enough, but then you have to consider the air flow of the room, the ventilation of the building and the effect of the urban environment on the building.

So what tends to happen is that buildings and urban areas are simplified down into basic shapes with all the fine details neglected and this is either modelled at a smaller scale in a wind tunnel or by using CFD (computer fluid dynamics). However, how do we know whether these models are representative of the real-world?

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This is Straw city, which was built in Silsoe U.K during 2014. You can just see the car behind the array (purple circle), these cubes of straw are 6 m tall, or roughly the height of an average house. Straw city is the stepping stone between the scale models and the real world, and was an urban experiment in a rural environment. We measured inside the array, outside of the array and within the blue building so we could see the link between internal and external flow: which meant the use of drones and smoke machines! The focus of the experiment was on the link between ventilation and the external conditions.

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Smoke releases, drone flying, thermal imaging and tracer gas release: some of the more fun aspects of the fieldwork

After 6 months of data collection, we took the straw cubes away and just monitored the blue cube on its own and the effect of the array can clearly be seen in this plot, where pink is the array, and blue is the isolated cube. So this is showing the pressure coefficient (Cp),  and can be thought of as a way of comparing one building to another in completely different conditions. You can see that the wind direction has an effect and that the array reduces the pressure felt by the cube by 60-90 %. Pressure is linked to the natural ventilation of a building: less pressure means less flow through the opening.

 

Alongside the big straw city, we also went to the Enflo lab at the University of Surrey to run some wind tunnel experiments of our own, which allowed us to expand the array.

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Photos of the wind tunnel arrays. Left is the biggest array modelled, centre is the Silsoe array, top right is the wind tunnel and roughness elements. Bottom right is the model of the storage shed at the full-scale site and centre is the logging system used.

So we have a data set that encompasses all wind directions and speeds, all atmospheric stabilities, different temperature differences and different weather conditions. It’s a big data set and will take a while to work through, especially with comparisons to the wind tunnel model and CFD model created by the University of Leeds. We will also compare the results to the existing guidelines out there and to other similar data sets.

I could ramble on for hours about the work, having spent far too long in a muddy field in all weathers but for more information please email me or come along to my departmental seminar on the 8th November.

This PhD project is jointly funded by the University of Reading and the EPSRC and is part of the Refresh project: www.refresh-project.org.uk

Macmillan coffee morning

Hannah GoughLeave a comment

Email: h.l.gough@pgr.reading.ac.uk

If there are two things that keep the Met department running it’s cake and coffee. This year the department got involved in the Macmillan coffee morning on the 30th September and raised a whopping £282 within three hours.

There was a bake off, a general cake sale and a guess the number of spots on a cake game, which got very scientific! The bake off had four categories, each with a prize: Savoury, bake your research, green theme and free-from, ensuring that there was something for everybody. As always the competition was good-natured but fierce and the judges (2 members of staff, 1 post-doc and 1 PhD student) had a sugar crash at around 3pm.

Here are some of the creations from the event:

First up (left) a chocolate cake carved into the shape of Africa, complete with wildlife, sprinkles and clouds. The judges didn’t want to cut this one, choosing to eat Madagascar first!

The next bake (top middle) went on to win the Best in Bake-off award, vanishing within minutes of being put on the sale table! Each slice was a decadent mixture of chocolate and lime.

The marvellous creations in the bottom middle image were free from everything except nuts. Using vegan marshmallows and chocolate alongside gluten free biscuits created a wickedly dark rocky road with plenty of crunch and just the right amount of marshmallows.

These gluten free wind turbines (right) were entered into all four categories of the bake off. Making gluten free pastry is no mean feat and unless told, no-one was aware that these moreish snacks were gluten free!

Finally, a shot of the table before it got too full of goodies! There are the edges of vegan pretzels (front left), a shop brought Victoria sponge (front middle), a supreme chocolate cake with Malteaser decorations (right) and a hazelnut and pear chocolate brownie which really captured the autumnal flavours and was the first to be completely sold!

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Fortunately the department has its own running group to help counteract some of the cake eating.

That’s it from me for now, hopefully they’ll be more foodie posts soon!