Earlier we have been talking about how life is as a PhD student here at KTH. Today, I would like to describe another part. As a PhD student I am in the early stages in my professional career, still with limited knowledge, experience and network. The PhD studies helps with all of these. While knowledge and experience are build up on a daily basis, a network is built and expanded through talking people. Throughout the last two years, due to the pandemic, we did not have the chance to meet many other people working in our area, especially outside of KTH.
With the pandemic seemingly to be over in Europe, I was given the opportunity to attend a PhD summer school on power electronics, electrical machines, energy control and power systems in Gaeta, Italy. This was the first opportunity for me to attend an event to meet with other young researchers in my field. Furthermore, the course helped me to earn the required credits.
The summer school was organized by the university of Cassini and as they are in charge of the medieval castle in Gaeta, that was the venue. Gaeta is a small medieval town at the shore of Italy south of Rome. With a total of five PhD students from our division we took the airplane on Sunday to Rome and took the train to Gaeta, enough time to check in the accommodation and take a round in the town.
On Monday, the school started. After the introduction, throughout the week we listened to lectures from professors of several European universities on various topics in the topic. One lecture on wireless power transfer, with details on why, how and where. Other lecturers spoke about the global elevator industry, the overall development as well as special challenges from a technical perspective. We also received information on practical laboratory work, i.e. how to implement power hardware in the loop tests.
Next to listening to lectures, one essential part of a researcher’s life is to present the own work. A common way is to use a scientific poster. I was not in the group who had to present a poster, but I took the chance to have a look on other students work. A poster is a short summary of one’s work and a starter for a discussion. Everyone of us, who attended from KTH, found a fellow student who works on something similar. A great chance to see how other people approach a problem and maybe a source of inspiration for the own work.
Last but not least, one intense week also has space for informal exchange. For that purpose, the summer school organized lunch, coffee breaks and night filling dinners for us to get to know each other in a casual way. And since it was Italy, of course the food was amazing.
After this one week, did I not only listened to a wide selection of experts of my field, but also gained insight into PhD life in other countries and universities. I found PhD students to discuss academic topics but also how to master the pitfalls of mastering a PhD. Returning back to Stockholm, I was happy to get some rest and not having 100people around me but also sad to leave my new gained contacts behind.
This week, I took the final test of this summer school. With this, the summer school is finally done. With this experience in the mind, one more motivation to publish on a conference in order to meet more fellow PhD students.
If you would like to know more about this particular summer school, you can have a look here: https://www.ecpe.org/events/european-phd-school/european-phd-school/
Sometimes unexpected things happen. When I came back from Christmas vacation I was surprised by a non-working baking oven. What a great time for something like this to happen? – I thought in the first place. But what can you do sometimes? So, I called my house caretaker, made a fault report and got an appointment with a service company.
This week, finally this service company arrived and in a rather quick repair of maybe 10minutes they exchanged the motor for the fan and the series connected heating element since they burned due to a defect of the motor. Fair enough, as someone who works on fault tolerance I had to fulfill my duty and kept this machine for some analysis. This one here, had no fault-tolerance at all obviously.
So, let us have a closer look. My oven is connected via a three-phase plug, so theoretically, it could have been a proper AC-machine. This here is however an universal machine. Basically a DC-machine where the excitation and armature winding a series connected to make it work with one-phase AC. The type of power coming out of a regular plug.
The two connections at the bottom are the two electrical contacts. Also, the excitation winding is wound around the stator iron. It is underneath the tape and around the brown plastic bobbin. The rotor and the armature are not really visible because the mounting in the upper half covers it.
Well, why this machine then? The main reason here must be the cost, it is simple and does not cost a lot to produce as there is not that much. I can count the number of laminations per hand and they are not even glued, as the staples indicate. One winding is cheaper than three and being able to operate directly from a normal wall outlet is a major advantage. Actually, basically all home appliances run on some variant of this machine. So, the next time you grind your coffee, blend your smoothie or vacuum clean, you know what is making the blades spin.
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:
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