Reverb10 - Day 5: Let go

December 5 – Let Go.

What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

(Author: Alice Bradley)


I let go of clutter

I am a giant pack-rat, and one of my challenges for last year was to let go of clutter, both objects and emotional.

Letting go of clutter - objects

I did quite some progress here. It all started earlier in 2009, when I had to move back from the US to Europe. When I left, I filled an entire trash bag with stuff I did not need anymore and another trash bag with clothes to bring to a charity.

Before that,I would keep everything I had. Now I really had to sort out and see what I could take along with me on the flight. I have kept this attitude and started to sort out my things.

By now, I seriously have been thinning out clothes and shoes. Even though I still have too much, I feel that it has become much easier for me to simply throw something away or donate it.

I still face the challenge to sort out my books, and to sort out all the random stuff I have at my parents' place. That is one of my day zero projects, and it is on that list for a reason :)

The first steps have been taken, and I feel that I am progressing bit by bit. Sorting out cupboards, re-organizing and creating more room for the things I really use now feels good to me.

Letting go of clutter - emotional

I only started to try this about two months ago. I would like to attach more value to emotions that are positive and related to the persons I care about, and to drag less negative emotions with me of situations that actually do not matter and persons who do not contribute to my life.

I hope I can report some good progress here in about half a year.

Reverb10 - Day 4: Wonder

December 4 – Wonder.
How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
(Author: Jeffrey Davis)

Thinking about this question, I realize that wondering is an essential part of my life, in many different ways.

I wonder about research questions.

Thinking out of the box and wondering why we make certain assumptions are supposed to be my daily activities. Supposed to be, that is.

Too often, I just rush around the day in a reactive mode: helping out colleagues, replying e-mail, planning my experiments. My day gets stuffed with short activities, while I need large batches of time to actually do the real scientific work and think deeply.

One of my challenges for the next year will be to create this room for creativity in my schedule. I might start to set office hours, and try to put my meetings less scattered around in time.

I wonder about the opportunities I get.

It is amazing to discover what happens if you open doors. I am very fortunate in my project to decide what I want to try out and where I would like to go.

One of these doors I opened, was to go to a conference. It was my very first conference ever and I went all by myself. Before that, I was dead nervous. I was afraid my work would be criticized. I was afraid no one would talk to me.

But I am so glad I went there. i learned so much and met so many people. Senior researchers would come up to me and start a conversation. I was not feeling alone or not part of the community, I was feeling very welcome indeed.

I am glad that I took the challenge.

I wonder about our beautiful world.

I try to enjoy all seasons and all changes in nature as much as possible. I enjoy walking outside and admiring a beautiful scenery and wondering about our wonderful world.

I used to live for summer, and ignore all other seasons. During the winter, I would feel very tired and without energy. I thought there was no solution at all to it.

Recently I discovered that the solution lies within accepting the beauty of every season. This is the first winter in which I feel as vivid and happy as during summertime. I just gave up on complaining, and decided to indulge in the beauty of the season. It was that easy to cure my winter disease.

Reverb10 - Day 3: Moment

December 3 – Moment.

Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

(Author: Ali Edwards)


My walk around the Laguna de Limpiopungo

 

Only a very few times in my life I have experienced the beauty and vastness of nature to this extent. Walking around this lake at an altitude of 3800m above sea level was a wonderful experience.

I was in the wonderful company of my boyfriend, his daughter and two of his cousins. We had just visited the parking lot of the Cotopaxi at 4500m above sea level, where we had been walking literally in a snow or ice rain cloud. I was chilled to the bone.

The sun came out as soon as we reached the lake. The air was of a freshness and purity I had never experienced before. The lake was reflecting in the late afternoon sun like a thousand diamonds. In all this abundance, I started walking. 

I was filling my lungs with this pure air, and discovering the small flowers that grow at this high altitude. The grass under my walking boots felt hard and short. Even though it was very cold, the sun was shining very brightly since I was walking very close to the equator.

Around the lake, the colors were mainly green, yellow and brown. The little flowers were purple, and the water and sky were bright blue. After walking for half an hour, something wonderful happened: a rainbow appeared. The sky was so bright and the air was so pure that I could see the rainbow very sharply. It was a complete arc, I could see its beginning and its end. For the first time in my life I had seen a complete rainbow.

I was amazed by all this beauty, and I remember this walk very often.

Reverb10 - Day 2: Writing

December 2 - Writing.
What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
(Author: Leo Babauta)

I write, and then I wait for the input of my supervisors.

I usually write a draft (conference) paper in a concentrated writing wave of about 2 or 3 days. In the best cases, I just sit down in my office, connect to grooveshark for my favorite music, and start writing and writing. I then print out my first draft. About a week later, I proofread this draft, make some changes (typically this involves considerable changes) and then I submit it to my advisors for their input.

There are two things I would like to discuss in further detail concerning my writing.

Avoiding writer's block

I've found my way to avoid writer's block and to actually enjoy writing.

All through my childhood and teenage days, I enjoyed writing. I wrote short stories, kept a diary and I wrote poems (and participated in an organization for poetry and young people, and in competitions and all fun stuff I enjoyed back then). Acknowledging the fact that, in essence, I enjoy writing was a first step to overcome my fear of an empty white screen.

Knowing this, I started to write intensely for my PhD. I started to write discussions and summaries of interesting papers and documents I had been reading. I started to write out the results of my parameter studies. I started writing a large literature review which I update every time I come across an interesting paper.

You might wonder, what is the use of my overactive typing? To me, the value of this is that I always have some information ready to pull contents from. When I write a paper in which I compare my experimental results to code methods, I don't have to spend much time on explaining those code methods. I can simply pull the information from one of my documents, and then alter it a bit to fit the contents and purpose of the paper under consideration.

The value of other people's input

I don't feel confident about my scientific writing yet. By the time I write and defend my dissertation, I hope will have found this confidence. As for now, I still heavily rely on the input of others. But, since my advisors are very busy people, I have the impressions they do not really have the time to deeply check my writing and will only get what I call the "first level" errors out of it: typos and little lacks in the text and drawings. However, to really learn to become a better writer, I hope to get some more structural feedback: leave out a certain section, discuss something else...

Therefore, I have tried to determine for myself why and when I find a paper well-written. I am trying to learn from other people's writing style and implementing this into my own style. However, I still feel that I need a guiding hand in my writing.

What helped you to become a better scientific writer?

Reverb10 - Day 1: One word

I have just discovered reverb10. Even though I am a few days too late to start in time with this challenge, I decided I would like to give it a go. I might not be able to keep up with the challenge until the end of the month, since I will be traveling all around in the second half of the month, but the idea of writing on a day to day basis and sorting out what happened the last year sounds very tempting to me.

The first day reads:
December 1 - One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?
(Author: Gwen Bell)

Start

2010 felt as the start of so many different things to me. Even though my PhD itself started late 2009, it is only in 2010 that I started to understand the real challenge of this project and that I understood that I have to take lead in my own project. I started to be in charge of my project.

Then, during the summer holidays I went to visit the family of my boyfriend. Having met eachothers' families and roughly decided where we will live after grad school gives me the idea that we really have started a long-term project together.

After these holidays, I started to push myself out of my comfort zone. Challenging myself to exercise more, eat healthier, feel less stressed and overall live a more balanced and healthier life has made me feel less tired than I used to feel. I still have days on which I prefer to stay inside instead of going to the gym and stuff myself with chocolate (today, I admit, was one of those days), but I feel I am doing progress.

For 2011, I hope the word will be "progress". I hope I can further develop the changes I initiated in my life this year.

Evaluation of my presentation

Time to reflect on yesterday's presentation....

Something interesting happened during my presentation, which tells me a lot about myself. Even though I was well prepared and put a lot of effort into making drawings for my presentation as well as stating clear goals and a clear key message of my presentation, even though I was not nervous three days ahead, I still felt extremely uncomfortable.

And the reason was very simple. One person (one of my colleagues, actually), sitting right in front of me, was talking to the people next to him, and making fun of me and my gestures during my presentation. This made me feel so uncomfortable, insecure, nervous, distracted and during the questions, I was doubting myself. Just because I felt the negative attitude of one person making me very clear that my work is not good.

I've been having this problem before, as a musician. Last year, I sang at a concert in our department during the lunch break. The negative attitude of some of my coworkers (music is not science therefore irrelevant and ridiculous) made me feel very nervous, and I performed very badly. I couldn't even have my breathing correctly supporting my singing.

Another example is almost 10 years ago, but I never forgot it because it was a very negative experience for me. I was playing cello then as a soloist on the concert of the winners of the city medal for music. Right in front of the stage, our mayor fell asleep while I was putting my heart into my Bach cello suite. It disturbed me so much, I ended up playing not well at all.

The lesson I learn from this is that I am very vulnerable to the atmosphere in which I perform or present. If one person can make the atmosphere turn hostile against me, I am lost.

Up to now, I don't know how to shield myself against these influences. I should just ignore it, but I'm an HSP, so sensing my environment is my natural behavior.

How can you ignore someone's hostile attitude while you are presenting?

Tomorrow's presentation

Tomorrow I will be presenting again at the same symposium where I had my first presentation about my research one year ago.
Last year, my presentation wasn't bad, but there was a lot of room for improvement. I've corrected some of last year's mistakes and wanted to write this out here for myself to see what I've learned, to see if I'll have more to add to this in one year from now, and maybe new PhD students can learn from this too.

1. Prepare ahead
Last year, I had to make my presentation the afternoon before the moment of the presentation. I wasn't expecting that I would be presenting. I checked the box "I would like to give a presentation" but later on I heard that only 3rd and 4th year PhD students would be presenting. Then, the day before the symposium, I came back to my office in the afternoon, after arriving from a transatlantic flight in the morning. Totally jet-lagged I looked at my mail, to find out that I would be the first one to present. If only I would have had some slides ready (just in case, they always come in useful), if only I would have an idea of an outline.... but no,I had to start from scratch at that very moment, I even had to go and take pictures in the lab. I've learned that it is very good to always have something ready, just in case.

2. Know your audience
Last year, I didn't check to whom I would be speaking. I just assumed everyone out there would be a structural engineer. I didn't know it would be open to all civil engineers and architects. So I immediately jumped into the core of the problem, with not much introduction. This year, most of my presentation is figures and concepts.

3. Try out to work with a key message
This year, I made a slide with my key message which I will show twice during my presentation. I hope that will make my most important hypothesis clear enough. It's the first time I try this approach.

4. The importance of the Q&A
Last year I answered some questions too quickly because I thought they were irrelevant. I think the asker was not too happy about that. I promise I won't do this again, and I promise I'll try to let the asker finish his or her question before interrupting (very difficult for me).

Alright, now I'll go back to packing my bag for the symposium. I'm not nervous (yet), which is also an improvement as compared to last year.