This year has been busy, particularly from the end of summer. It always is of course. Shifting boundaries between work and home life is often enough to flag it as unusual or to warrant a re-think; perhaps it comes with general physical and mental fatigue. This doesn’t necessarily have to reflect predominantly negative and/or uncontrolled…
Category: Career progression
The forgotten art of taking notes?
Maybe its just me, but… For the undergrad, postgrad and seasoned researcher, there can be huge amounts of information to digest on a day-to-day basis. Nowadays there is perhaps an increased challenge of trying to filter good information from the bad, especially if extracted from the internet. It would therefore seem natural to use effective…
Rejection
Rejection is part of academic life. I guess we often hide these discussions in local corridors or with colleagues who have a similar outlook. It is as common a phenomenon as end-of-semester marking. But just how useful is it in shaping who we are? Silly question? I don’t think so. Not anymore. Over the last…
The EGU. #EGU17
By Bernardo Bellotto – Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Bilddatenbank., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=637565
The conference explorer
I’m excited to be attending one of my favourite conferences in less than one week’s time, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. It is relatively enormous as far as conference attendee numbers are judged. This puts some off, but to me it offers far more advantages than disadvantages. One is the immense flexibility…
Take a break, make a breakthrough
Scientists can wander through periods of intense personal drive. It might be focusing on a single project, a single activity, or it might be building up a holistic view of a given phenomena. Personal drive, often presented as passion, can be a richly rewarding. The brain sparks into life whilst a feeling of excitement fills…
Email – wrestling with the beast
Its great how easy we can communicate these days, but at what cost? I can remember first using email at college and finding it the route of easy jokes between friends. A few of us would send quick, daft, messages to each other, and that was it. Moving to university it became a mechanism of…
A night owl, coding/working at 7:30am
I’m a night owl. Well, at least, that’s the label I’ve carried for as long as I can remember. Is it just the default option I have or do I have another mode that has been dormant for so long? If I have a night to myself I will stay awake until my eyes can…
A big computer in a chapel, Barcelona
I’ve just finished help co-host a new conference series called EMiT which presents work from developers and users of emerging computing technology. It’s a cool conference, and we managed to squeeze in a tour of the MareNostrum supercomputer. A friend and colleague Dr Michael Bane spun the idea of EMiT up 3 years ago, and…
Battling with time management
How many of you start the week with a rigid plan? Time management is an aspect of my career I have battled with for a while. Having said that, I have only really started reflecting on it since managing my own projects and personnel. Some weeks I have clear objectives that are defined by my…
Physik und Kaffee in beautiful Vienna
I had the pleasure of spending w/c 18th of April 2016 in Vienna at the European Geophysical Union (EGU). I recall first visiting the picturesque city back in 2004 towards the tail end of my Phd. I say tail-end, it was the rough end of trying to finish everything! I have a lot to thank…
Dr David Topping 