Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Grad school

Grad school is the kind of place which can mess up with your inside, if you not keep track of yourself. However much you work often it feels like you are not doing enough. You are not making enough efforts. There is always much more you can do or you could have done. So much to do, so much to learn.
And then there are times when you wonder whether what you are doing really matters. Does anyone care about it? Does it really makes a difference? Why are you doing this? This feeling very aptly summarized bellow by phdcomics.



To take it to extreme some would feel they are not entitled to having fun at all. Any time they catch themselves not working it feels guilty of some sort. Then I discovered it is not a singleton behaviour. There are multitudes of us.

So what is it that helps get around some of such stuffs? You would not guess: thorough literature review. I was reading a lot of previous works related to simulation of flow around marine and hydrokinetic turbines in natural river flows and to be honest I was tiny bit surprised that how little has been done. I came across really crappy published papers in random ass conferences getting 20-30+ citations within an year. There was also a published study about the same topic in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A which looked like a conference paper worth of work. All of which makes what I plan to do (assuming I successfully do it, or plan to attempt) more important than I thought.

SIGH... Back to Work!

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