Finally, a writing day

Today has been a quite successful day in terms of the work on my PhD thesis. Yesterday, after the disk quota crisis, we had a team meeting at work (yes, still via zoom, anyone how can effectively work from home is doing it), and I came relatively unscathed after having served a number of requests from other colleagues over the last week. That meant that this morning I was done with my day job roughly by 10:00 and could devote the rest of the day to my "other" job.

Image by athree23

I have to admit that I am not a scientist by training, but an engineer, so the whole scientific method is not at all alien to me, I can understand the premises, follow the reasoning and accept or refute the conclusion, but I have never than it in a formal way by myself. Over the more than 20 years since I graduated, I have co-authored a number of papers but they were inevitably led by senior scientists, who had already abundantly experience in writing them and who, on the other side, would not allow a newbie to interfere with the general layout of the article: content contributions were mandatory, comments were encouraged, major proposals were absolutely frowned upon. The main result is that I am currently sailing uncharted waters for me and that makes the work twice as hard.

Fortunately Kim, one of the members of my Thesis Advisory Committee which I mentioned a couple of days ago, is always ready to listen to my thoughts, read and re-read my drafts, provide useful comments, and all that almost on a weekly basis, which I am very thankful for. Particularly in the times of the corona virus, where one can spend a whole week without meeting or event talking to a colleague, having some professional interaction on a regular basis is invaluable. From these humble pages, Kim, thank you very much for your support.

So today I have spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon writing my paper, finishing the theoretical part where the model is described, which had been sitting untouched for nearly a month. The bad part of writing this paper is that Kim "suggested" (i.e. established) that we use LaTeX, which I had never done before. The good part is that over the last few months I have improved my skills remarkably thanks to tools like StackExchange (what did we do before the internet?).

Now that the theoretical part is written, all I have left to do is implement the model, fit the data, draw the conclusions and write the report. A piece of cake.

Karen has just pointed out that the weather is going to be really hot the next few days and that we should try to get at least a small inflatable swimming pool that we can set up in the garden to get a soak whenever it gets too hot to stay in the house. I will keep you posted on what comes out of that. Have a nice evening.