PhD: 3 weeks in
After neglecting the blog for so long, I realised that I’ve currently said nothing about starting my PhD (although there’s probably a lot of stuff about applying, funding and soforth). In the anticipation of encountering numerous challenges — all worthy of screaming at my computer — I’ve set up a category for all the useless posts that will clearly appear over the next 3.5 years.
So, I started precisely 3 weeks ago. The first couple of weeks were essentially spent organising various times for meeting my supervisor and generally not doing a whole lot of work. It also involved meeting my supervisees for the year: I have four groups of second-year supervision groups, and they seem to be coming along nicely. Besides the rather large pile of marking it’s quite enjoyable, so I’m looking forward to completing all of that.
I’m also attending a couple of courses to patch over areas that I’ve not really touched in a huge amount of detail. The first is a fourth year Pattern Formation course. Currently we haven’t done too much in that besides cover some simple background information on group theory and linear stability analysis. That should change this week when we start to look at some simple PDE problems.
The other course is a third-year fluid dynamics course, which is meant to give a more physics-like overview of simple problems in fluid mechanics — starting with material derivatives and simple boundary-layer problems, and then moving on to waves and some instability theory. Whilst I took the Analytical Fluid Mechanics course last year, that concentrated on a purely theoretical approach to the Navier-Stokes equations and didn’t really go into great depth on any of this sort of stuff.
It’s very difficult to tell what my actual aim should be at the moment. I’ve read a number of papers so far, mostly concentrating on pattern formation and pipe flow. I really started to work at problems this week, and managed to do a successful simulation of some basic Couette and Poiseulle flows in a 2D channel.
Anyway, back to work for now and I shall at least attempt to keep the blog updated on further process.