08 - Ma première "vraie" formation en français

So yes, it's true, I attended my first French training. First of all I had to admit that it was very tiring and I wasn't able to focus 100% of the time. Actually it reminded me of the times when I was doing my exchange year in Prague during my BSc. In Prague it was the first time I was following (technical) lectures in English and it was pretty much the same feeling as following the past two days this training in French. I try to summarize the phenomenon in a few steps:

07 - Academia or industry? Academia and industry!

One particularity of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITNs is that the Early STage Researchers (ESRs) are 'obliged' to conduct their research with the collaboration of at least at one academic and one industrial partner. Some of us stay most of the time at a University and go for a secondment to a company and some of us do the same but vice versa. My host is Phimeca Engineering in France but I often go to UCD and I actually stayed there for 5 months starting from November 2016 for my secondment. But which one is better? And better for what? For your PhD? For your personal development? For the research itself? I don't promise to give you proper answers in this post, but I will try to spotlight the good side of both.

06 - About the dark side of bridge engineering

As I promised you – few decades ago – in this post I'm going to show you some examples of sad accidents involving bridges. I collected some data from the news about bridge collapses during the year of 2016. I'm sure I cannot present here an exhaustive list – I'll only talk about 18 cases in the following –, so please feel free to share in a comment if you know other accidents that I miss to report. 

05 - Thoughts about research and publication

I had planned to write a post about 'bridge collapses in 2016' since last October, but somehow I never found the time to put together the data I had collected. Anyway, I hope that in the near future you can also read about that topic in this blog, but today there is something else I want to talk about. I have some questions in my mind that I've been trying to answer... So basically in this post I'm just going to think loudly. Meaning that there will be more questions than answers :)