in the last two weeks I have been visiting two very different conferences back to back.
The first one is ICEM 2024, the international conference on electrical machines, a biannual conference on electrical machines and drives. I would dare to say that it is the most relevant conference on our field in Europe. It was this time held in Turin, Italy at the Politechnico di Torino. I went there to present preliminary results I got from an exchange stay at the University of Bologna. But this conference was more like a gathering of everyone. I met all the people I have met in all the conferences in the last five years including most of the professors from all the papers I was reading. This means that other than presenting and listening to potentially relevant presentations for my work, the breaks were times to say hello to known faces and get to know new ones.
A major part of research is collaboration since nobody can do everything. So, running around and find out what other people are working on is an integral part of attending a conference. Of course, it is also a good chance to meet people from industry and see which problems they are trying to solve. If you want, to break out from the academic bubble.
As you can imagine, such a conference day can be very exhausting. Luckily, the social dinner was held at MAUTO, the italian museum of automobiles. Since Turin is the city of the car manufacturer FIAT, there is a long tradition this industry. While receiving a fancy italian dinner with local dishes, it is a great opportunity to unwind and chat with the fellows.
Social Dinner at ICEM 2024
Porjus hydro-power plant original 1910 station.
After this week, I needed a break and spend the weekend in north Italy for some relaxing days before continuing to the STandUP academy in Luleå. STandUP for energy is an organization in Sweden funding research in energy related topics. On this annual gathering, researchers from KTH, Uppsala Universitet, Svenska Landbruks Universitet and Luleå Tekiska Universitet gather and discuss their results. As part of this, we visited the newly constructed hydro-power plant in Rengård, the wind-power plant in Markbygden and the larger hydro-power plant in Porjus.
I was very impressed by the implications of our energy production on the landscape and the environment but also by the technology and current questions.
A big misconception in the academic world is that working hard and working smart are the same. Well, they are not.
You could also entitle this post “Save yourself before it is too late.” It is a message to those falling into the spiral of death in academia.
We need to go back in time: it is the winter 2008-2009, and I am a doctoral student at the University of Padova, temporarily dispatched to ABB Corporate Research in Västerås, Sweden, for five months. This is the same place where I got my first employment in 2010 and where I stayed for eight years of my professional life.
During that period, ABB advertised a researcher position in the team. Many candidates came to Västerås for the interview. In one case, the team manager asked me to join the candidate’s technical presentation and then asked me to talk privately to this person to understand him more from a personality standpoint. I was culturally closer to this person than the manager, so he relied on that to know more about the candidate.
The manager and I discussed my conversation with the candidate afterward. He asked me what I thought of the candidate. I said, “Well, he knows his technical part and is a hard-working guy.”
The manager looked at me and said, “I do not want hard workers; I want smart workers. I want someone who does the job excellently and then leaves the premises to do something else at home.” He was not joking.
When I terminated my period at ABB and returned to Italy to complete my studies, I was involved in a workshop where the local industry and the university met to discuss the future of electrical machines and drives. My former supervisor, prof. Zigliotto, was with me, too. I remember him talking to one of the CEOs of the participating industry. This CEO told him: “Look, when I receive a CV from a student of your university, I look at the grade the student has received from you. I know that your grades are a summary of the person’s technical skills, personality, and humanity. If the student has low grades in your course, I exclude it immediately even if the other grades are excellent.”
These two examples have permanently shaped my professional life. Needless to say, I have an enormous amount of respect for people who carry on their work in such a way that technical achievements are just a part of a well-rounded, healthy, and happy life, inside and outside the office.
It is sad to see how these simple concepts of life are neglected everywhere. You do not need to go far to see people working 24/7 and being “socially incompetent”… and for what? A name on an article? Glory? But who is giving you glory? Other 24/7 monkeys?
My stand is this:
If you need to work 24/7 to make a career, you are not smart. You are evidently missing the technical skills to do your job and go home.
If you work 24/7 because you have collected too many different tasks, you cannot envision a clear path for your career. Think smart and eliminate unnecessary tasks.
If you work 24/7 because you want to publish more than everyone else, question yourself if your publications have an impact. And I do not mean the number of references from other 24/7 monkey articles. I mean impact as a change in society or industry. Are you contributing to a better future for everyone?
If you work 24/7 because you think that everyone else does it and therefore you should do it too, then you are a 24/7 monkey. Too late.
Every person I recruit goes through an adjustment period when they realize the way I work. I bring the challenge to them immediately from the start:
I want your work to have an impact in society or industry.
Publications will follow your impact. Quality over quantity.
Be smart and have a life outside the office. Take days off and vacations to cool down.
If you reflect on it, these three points are the most challenging job task ever. I ask you to change the world with breakthrough solutions in an 8-hour working day, excluding weekends and vacations.
If you manage to do that, you will have my respect. If you don’t, well, we tried. But at least you are not a 24/7 monkey.
now in July Sweden goes into some form of hibernation and with it KTH as well. July is the month where most Swedish work places take summer vacation, including KTH. The reason to this is likely the climate here. With the long and dark winter behind, now is the time of (moderately) warm weather and long sunny days, with only four hours of night in Stockholm.
All teaching end by the end of May, examinations take place in the first half of June. In the second half of June falls “Midsommar”, the most important celebration in Sweden. People celebrate the summer and life outside. Just have a look yourself:
Midsommar pole, but one of the rings fell down.
The summer is a time to relax and recharge the batteries. While many Swedish families have a summer house in a remote area, others go into the mountainous areas to get a change of tapestry. A big portion of the students use this time to do some work for earning some income for the rest of the year or conduct a paid internship at a company to gain some experience.
With august, people are coming back to work with the new semester starting usually at the end of it, hopefully well rested and full of energy.
Hi everyone! Last week, I paid a visit to the Power Electronics Machines and Drives (PEMD) conference in Nottingham. The East Midlands is an area in which the spirit of Sir Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce is still lingering. The company hosts a big R&D site just outside of Nottingham in Derby, and its engineers constitute a portion of the many industrial delegates who were participating in the conference. The conference is likely my last as a Ph.D. student, and my feeling of belonging to the electrical machines and drives community has definitely grown since I first participated in a similar conference more than four years ago.
Nottingham, the home of Robin Hood.
PEMD 2024 opening at Nottingham University.
After four and half years of research, you leave quite some remaining in your digital libraries. So when it’s time to summarize your work in a thesis and get ready for your post-PhD life, it is necessary to engage in a bit of clean-up and dust-off process.
The first association of this process that came to my mind was an activity known as “döstäda” in Swedish, which literally means “death-clean” in English. Interestingly enough, I found out that there does not really seem to exist any corresponding word for this activity in English. However, the excellent newspaper The Local, which writes about Swedish news and customs in English, describes it very well: “The uniquely Swedish practice of ‘Döstädning’ (death-cleaning) is a method of decluttering based on which objects will be of value to loved ones after your death”, which is pretty much what any doctoral student has to do towards the end of his or her research education.
The thesis at KTH can be written as either a monography or a compilation of the peer-reviewed research papers that you have published. In my case, I have opted for the compilation. Practically, it means that I will weld all the papers in my portfolio together, and the main challenge is to ensure appropriate adhesion between all the bits and pieces. To begin with, why did we study the particular subjects? Using a top-down perspective, problems identified in the industry and within previous research set the ground. My method of ushering the reader through the text then becomes more introspective, which makes quite a lot of sense. Think of it as a natural evolution in research. Once you have your results in place, you need to assess your own work and then improve on it, meaning you first need to identify its weaknesses. This process ties quite well to a maxim, attributed to Sir Henry Royce of Rolls-Royce, that I saw on a wall of the conference center of Nottingham University the other day:
“Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best that exists and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.”
As some of you already knew that I finally made up my mind to take a position in the academia rather than in the industry, it’s always hard for me to explain why. I’m neither a enthusiastic speaker nor a percipient thinker. It can be challengeable for me to go towards a position in a university. I thought that I should have lost my mind at that time. It drives me to explore my internal desire for this decision.
Before that, let me say some good word for our group, from the perspective of a native Chinese PhD. I have to admit that I’m so lucky to work in the EMD group, which “pulls” me to develop my research area in the postdoc period. (Footnote: the reason why I used “pull” rather than “push” is that I need to be efficient and open-minded dealing with my project work while exploring more research area freely. I don’t feel pushed or stressed out, and receive lots of help and supports. “push” is a negative word rather than a neutral word in my language). My supervisor Luca gave me the freedom to investigate the challenge and difficulty in the industry so that it could show the direction of our future work. In other words, I could work closely with Zparq and ABB to gain more experience.
In fact, it’s Luca who decided to join this project/team (ExpSkills-REM), whose latese event was to give the course at Narva. The aim of ExpSkills-REM is to educate professionals who work or intend to work in the field of permanent magnets along the whole value chain, including recycling and motor applications: Raw Materials, Technological Magnets, Circular Economy and Electromobility coming together. In Narva Estonia, Neo Performance Materials is building a permanent magnet factory, making it the first of its kind in Europe and the Western world. I hope this magnet product will be used in the permanent magnet motor soon.
For this course, thanks to the help and support of Luca, I had enough time to prepare our one-day module “Design and fabrication of REM-based devices and components” for this four-day course. Everything goes on well on those days except the heavy snow in Narva when we were visiting the factory.
Then, it became sunny again in the nex day.
For me, it’s the first time to give the course for the whole day. It is definitely a milestone in my life, but really tiring. Hence, I took a wonderful sauna after the course. There were always lots of interesting and useful discussion about some contents of the course, which inspired the teachers as well.
Coming back to the first question in this post, when comparing academia with industry, one of the major difference is that the position of the academia requires the duty of teaching and supervision, which is as important as the researching. I then realized that it’s also a great joy for me to discuss about the technical detail in the project as well as the philosophy of life. I hope to support my future friends (namely students) to freely explore their research and lifestyle. I already have been lucky enough to get this privilege at KTH and ZJU and I hope in the near future I also have the ability to share this luck/opportunity to those who believe in this way.
As this is my last weekend at KTH, I would like to say Hej då to all of you, EMD noblemen, project colleagues, and EPE friends. Take good care of yourself, as it is merely the deadline of the course, project, or paper, not the end of the world. Keep in touch and see you again.
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