I have been mulling over these thoughts for a while. Take it as a funny post and do not interpret it as a critique. It is not supposed to be.
The academic hierarchy is coded all over the world pretty much in the same way. In some countries those positions are felt, the hierarchy is strict, and referencing to people is abundant in titles. In other places, like Sweden for example, stratification exists but it is less visible in the daily work. People call each other by first names and no titles. Still, even in Sweden, some of the roles and tasks in the academic organization are allowed only to people holding a certain position.
What I find fascinating is the recognition that academic positions have across national borders. A professor in a country is a professor everywhere. If you plan to join an academic institution abroad, your title will be maintained in its equivalent form, and you might be assessed for taking a career step.
Such is not the case when you change work between private companies: your new position will be assessed based on your experience and fit with the company’s business core. The only equivalence with the academic world might be when you work for a multinational company and you internally apply to a job vacancy in another country. But that is not always the case.
I recalled that my uncle always said “History repeats itself in new clothes.” I started to use this concept to find an historical equivalent of the academic hierarchy. Eventually, I convinced myself of its affinity to the noble ranks of the middle age.
Let me first present my list of equivalence before discussing it. The academic positions that I used refer to the actual structure found in Swedish universities.
A Rector is a King / Queen
A School director is a Prince / Princess
A Department manager is a Grand Duke / Grand Duchess
A Division manager is a Duke / Duchess
A Professor is a Marquess / Marchioness
A Docent is a Count / Countess
An Associate Professor is a Viscount / Viscountess
An Assistant Professor is a Baron / Baroness
A Research Engineer is an Imperial Knight
A Postdoctoral Research Fellow is a Baronet / Baronetess
A Ph.D. student is a Knight / Dame
A Master Student is an Esquire / Madame
An Individual Project Student is a Gentleman / Maid
Now, a few considerations on the list. First, my reference for the ranks is Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial,_royal_and_noble_ranks) and I guess they have done a pretty good job, because the page is infinitely long. If you have any interest in knowing the difference between a Marquess and a Count, please refer to that page – you will make a direct connection to the academic hierarchy, I promise that.
Second, you may have noticed that positions 1 to 4 are a sort of line management at university, while 5 to 11 refer to classical positions in the organization. I decided to blend them because it reflects some of the opportunities that professors have within the organization (when interested). I also left out roles like vice-rectors and the likes, because I thought they were not necessarily in line with the vertical structure, and they were messing up a bit the whole game. For the specific example of vice-rectors, they may be considered the equivalent of the French “dauphins” – an heir apparent of the throne.
Third, I left our roles in education (like master program director and similar), because I am less acquainted with them and because I think they deserve a separate historical equivalence (which is not part of this post… work in progress).
Fourth, a note on the position 9: Research Engineers. In the current situation, it is not uncommon to find Research Engineers who are graduated Master Students who received a short scholarship to perform a scientific task. In the list, I am not referring to them. There are still a certain number of Research Engineers in universities who are full-time employees who are not entitled to climb the hierarchy. Since they are typically very experienced people combined with practical skills, I thought to pair them with the Imperial Knights, who were free nobles of the Holy Roman Empire responding directly to the King/Emperor. I think it fits well!
How to use this list? Well, it is pretty simple but it has to be thought through wisely. Let us take my own case. I took my Ph.D. working on induction and synchronous machines, dealing with sensorless control and electrical parameter estimation. I worked also with wind energy and multiphase drives after my doctoral studies, ending up being an Associate Professor in electrical machines and drives. Of all these things, the ones that characterize me the most are parameter estimation and multiphase drives. So I would summarize my title like this:
The Right Honourable Luca Peretti, Viscount of Electrical Machines and Drives, Lord of Multiphase Drives, Knight of the Order of Parameter Estimation.
What is it like to study for a PhD? This question probably has as many answers as there are doctors and PhD students. But in most cases, you will hear that it is a lot of work and many hours of diligent struggle. So research is tedious, you conclude.
However, working towards a PhD at a Swedish university includes much more than just conducting your own research. For sure, keeping up with the current research in your field, setting up experiments, testing out ideas in simulations, presenting your research, and other research related tasks comprise the bulk of the work load (it should make up 60 % of the time, according to the formal study plan that all PhD students set up). So what about the rest?
Let’s peak at my own schedule for Thursday and Friday last week. Although not being two typical days, they gives a pretty good indication about the average (how about that, do you remember your stats course?).
On Thursday, I went to Västerås to conduct experiments with a colleague who is carrying out an industrial PhD at ABB. We had a fairly rough start when realizing that the current sensors where picking up an awful amount of noise. Such intermezzos are almost commonplace when conducting experiments and something you learn to live with. Once solved, we could both run the experiments and have a long a fruitful talk about the machine modelling. Keeping in touch and sharing knowledge with industrial partners is an important part of the PhD studies.
Friday morning – after a night with not too much sleep – I had an oral exam in a course on electronic system design. Much like the studies on undergraduate level, a PhD student continues to take courses throughout his/her five years. Supposedly, they should make up 20 % of the curriculum.
My colleague, Giovanni, teaching the principles of magnetic induction and Lorentz force in our lab
Having passed the exam, I scrambled to the power electronics lab at KTH, which right now is hectic with different laboratory exercises in undergraduate power electronics and machines courses. My role was now switched from student to a tutor. Those four hours in the afternoon make up part of my departmental duties, which constitute another 20 % of the curriculum. For most of my colleagues and myself, that means tutoring including correcting hand-ins, and preparing tutorials and labs.
So if you ever went into a university lab with the equipment prepared for your experiment, you now know – from this post and the last – who set up the bench.
Christmas time is coming up, not only at Luca’s home, also in the Sustainable Power Lab (SPL) here at KTH. The SPL is located at Teknikringen 33, where we let ingenuity sprawl (to be judged by you 😉 ).
A major part for us EMD people in the advent time are the laboratory exercises in the course “Electrical machines and drives”. This task is taken over by the PhD students working on electrical machines and drives. Let me take the chance and introduce myself: My name is Yixuan and I am a PhD student with Luca on “Fault tolerance of electrical machines”. I will talk more about the research in another post.
So, with my fellow colleagues Giovanni and Gustaf, we are preparing the lab benches for the students these days. We call this task “the yearly sanity test” due to a latch circuit involved in the bench setup. In a nutshell, it is a circuit for on/off-buttons, such that one does not need to hold the on-button. This year, due to Giovanni’s experience, I consider us to have passed the test on the first try….not senile yet.
Another favorite component of ours are the rheostats, i.e. variable resistors. Very analogue and apparently fragile. Unfortunately, one of them didn’t survive this year so well.
Before the laboratory exercises start we will finish the benches and make sure that everything actually works. A small sneak-peak here:
The first Sunday of the Advent period calls for Christmas decorations and lights to pop out of the boxes where you left them the year before. The “Christmas equipment” is a nice warm touch in a dark and cold period and definitely a little event for the children at home. A few minutes of work and your house looks cozier such that you ask yourself why you do not keep the light all year around.
This year, the standard, entrenched practice of installing the lights at the windows experienced a significant delay when I made a discovery in one of our cupboards in the kitchen. I had never noticed it before and I still do not know how I could ignore it for so long. Take a look at this:
So, this is a set of eight glasses and a pitcher that my wife purchased even before we met each other, so it is pretty old :-). It has been well preserved all these years and occasionally used with guests. It is not the most refined one we have in the house (grading guests, uh?) but no one has ever complained. Those colors and round shapes call for a joyful friendly time tasting lemonade.
Not to the eyes of an EMD-trained person.
Take a closer look at one of the glasses:
To me, these are the CAD drawings of a concentrated-winding stator for an electrical machine. The lamination sheet has twelve slots which are somewhat large in relation to the stator yoke, maybe indicating that we are dealing with a machine with a high number of pole pairs. To be entirely honest, the teeth show a pretty thin guide for the magnetic flux, most probably reaching magnetic saturation with pretty low currents. Not a good design, overall.
Now you tell me, why on Earth the designer of this famous Scandinavian glass brand put a stator lamination drawing on a glass? Few possible reasons:
The partner of the designer is an EMD person, not necessarily working at KTH, but somewhere in the world. And he/she is pestering the designer about FEM simulations in such a way that the poor designer dreams about CAD drawings overnight and puts them in his/her daily artistic work.
The designer genuinely thinks that CAD drawings of stator lamination are a piece of art (general loud laugh).
The designer did not have any good idea for this series of glasses and googled for inspiration a series of random words taken from the first-morning radio program. Maybe they were talking about challenges in electromobility.
The designer came up with this drawing entirely on his/her own. Strange how the brain works sometimes. In difficult times, our mind goes back to primordial needs, and we all know how important electrical machines are for our daily life :-). In such a case, I would like to propose the glass designer as an honorary member of KTH EMD.
I did not share these thoughts at home. I am not sure they would have been well-received on the first Sunday of Advent.
Still, a question floats in the air: where is the rotor?
Welcome to our blog “Converted to energy conversion”! Yet another blog? Yes. But interesting.
We are a group of KTH people – master students, doctoral students, and faculty employees – who are passionate about electric energy conversion. We deal with all sorts of stuff like electric machines, frequency converters, electric drives, power electronics, control, etc. All that we need to produce mechanical power out of electric power supply (motors!) or to generate electric power out of mechanical power supply (generators!).
We like to simulate but mostly to test our ideas in the laboratory. Easily said than done. The struggles to make things work as they should are going to shape our own lives. In some cases, they have already irremediably done so.
This blog is meant to be a place for our thoughts and insights on our lives as KTH researchers in this scientific field. I hope it will be useful for understanding what actually happens behind the curtains, as well as for unloading our souls of the joys and pitfalls of our daily work.
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