09 – The rather unexpected benefits of a management course

Thanks to TRUSS we, the ESRs, had the opportunity to attend a 4 days management course at UCD in June. It was held by DCM Learning and it was a course after which you could obtain a QQI (Quality and Qualifications Ireland) Level 6 Certificate in Project Management. To get this, however, you need to do self-directed learning after the course and submit two assessments (one that is more theoretical and one that is more practical). But I stop here with the boring stuff :)

08 - Ma première "vraie" formation en français

So yes, it's true, I attended my first French training. First of all I had to admit that it was very tiring and I wasn't able to focus 100% of the time. Actually it reminded me of the times when I was doing my exchange year in Prague during my BSc. In Prague it was the first time I was following (technical) lectures in English and it was pretty much the same feeling as following the past two days this training in French. I try to summarize the phenomenon in a few steps:

07 - Academia or industry? Academia and industry!

One particularity of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITNs is that the Early STage Researchers (ESRs) are 'obliged' to conduct their research with the collaboration of at least at one academic and one industrial partner. Some of us stay most of the time at a University and go for a secondment to a company and some of us do the same but vice versa. My host is Phimeca Engineering in France but I often go to UCD and I actually stayed there for 5 months starting from November 2016 for my secondment. But which one is better? And better for what? For your PhD? For your personal development? For the research itself? I don't promise to give you proper answers in this post, but I will try to spotlight the good side of both.

06 - About the dark side of bridge engineering

As I promised you – few decades ago – in this post I'm going to show you some examples of sad accidents involving bridges. I collected some data from the news about bridge collapses during the year of 2016. I'm sure I cannot present here an exhaustive list – I'll only talk about 18 cases in the following –, so please feel free to share in a comment if you know other accidents that I miss to report. 

05 - Thoughts about research and publication

I had planned to write a post about 'bridge collapses in 2016' since last October, but somehow I never found the time to put together the data I had collected. Anyway, I hope that in the near future you can also read about that topic in this blog, but today there is something else I want to talk about. I have some questions in my mind that I've been trying to answer... So basically in this post I'm just going to think loudly. Meaning that there will be more questions than answers :)

04 - Where have all the female engineering students gone?

The title might seem a little bit forced, but otherwise I couldn't show you this video that I just found :) I wanted to write a post about engineer women because I recently attended two conferences (and will attend shortly the third) and couldn't help but notice one shocking phenomenon: the saddening ratio of female participants. (I'm a little bit afraid of writing about this so I want to make it clear already that I'm  not against engineer men, neither against engineer women, I just observed something that I'm sharing with you now.) You may say that it's perfectly normal in the engineering field but I can't agree with that because this is not what I remember back from my undergraduate and graduate student years. Before continue reading (in case you still insist on that...) please keep in mind that I do not intend to present here a scientific paper on the topic, just trying to capture my thoughts and collect my personal experiences on the issue.

03 - The main challenges vs the greatest benefits of being a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network Early Stage Researcher (ITN ESR)

(I guess I've just earned the award for the longest blog-post title ever)

In this post I want to share my personal experiences and views. And at first I have to tell that my case is a little bit special, because I came to France without speaking French and because I'm based at a small company in an office with only about 12 people (moreover who are all French).