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For whatever reasons, probably because I don’t say ‘no’ or I’m too arrogant to say ‘I don’t know’, I’m one of those people who always tries to help. I don’t ke
by knolan 7y ago
For whatever reasons, probably because I don’t say ‘no’ or I’m too arrogant to say ‘I don’t know’, I’m one of those people who always tries to help.
I don’t keep a brag document but I do keep a folder called People where there are folders for the people I’ve helped and subfolders for each problem they’ve come to me with. On one hand it’s useful because I can recycle the code but it also helps track how I’ve spent my time. I also tried to keep a diary but this was less successful.
I learned the hard way that being helpful is not always recognised, in fact I’ve had one manager openly hostile to the idea even if that meant the project would fail, it annoyed the hell out of me. (This manager came back from his MBA promoting a Whiplash approach to management and told us to actively ‘destroy’ the other teams in our company so there you go.) This was part of the reason I moved back to academia, now my job is to help young engineers be the best they can.
- ssivark 7y agoCould you elaborate on how you planned and executed the transition to academia? Your profile mentions that you lecture in fluid mechanics. Very curious about what skills/knowledge you could take from your engineering experience to your teaching.
- knolan 7y agoI’m an aeronautical engineer with a PhD in fluid mechanics, there’s not too much else to say on the transition to academia TBH. Regarding teaching, my exhaustion with an over dependence on PowerPoint for every aspect of communication in industry has me rebuilding an introductory fluid mechanics course in Jupyter with high quality visuals (images and videos) illustrating important concepts along side simple but useful code examples.
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoIs any part of that online in anyway? I just started as a prof and I am looking to do as well at teaching as I can.
- knolan 7y agoIt will all be available on github by the end of August. I’ll post it up here on HN for the craic. The challenge is that many of the students really don’t have the first clue how to really use a computer so getting them to install Python, Scipy and Jupyter is a big ask. They’ve barely scratched the surface with Matlab, and I’ve been told that many of them struggle to understand a desktop file system. Github will render the notebooks and they can copy the URL to Google colab should they wish to interact with the code. And of course there are detailed instructions for installing the required tools (and I’m keeping them to a minimum) on Windows/Mac/Linux for those who have an interest. The notebooks will also be available as embedded HTML so all the videos, images and interactive 3D models will just work on whatever device they have. The idea is to present half the course in this new way and the remainder in the old way (PowerPoint with redacted equations the students spend their time carefully copying down and not paying real attention to the discussion). After the first year I’ll collate the exam results and student feedback and publish a paper in some teaching and learning journal to share my findings. Hopefully the response is positive, I’ve put a lot of work into replacing a lot of terse and often abstract PowerPoint with engaging and detailed content, in particular I’m really proud of some of the Blender animations I’ve made using FLIP fluids to illustrate key concepts such as viscosity and surface tension.
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoThanks. Sounds interesting. I will keep an eye out.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoThat sounds really neat! Good luck!