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:
Step 1: You understand more or less
everything, you can follow what is going on, you are proud and happy.
Step2: You start to lose your focus
from time to time but you still follow the general ideas and you are
still kind of happy.
Step3: At one point you realize that
you are thinking about the weekend, or about the new Star Wars that
is coming to the cinemas this week. You shake your head (I sometimes
literally do it, but this may not be valid for everyone :) ) in order
to lose these unwise thoughts and get you head back to the topic of
the lecture.
Step4: You start to have a headache,
pain in your back or sore eyes. You feel that you don't understand
anything, you are totally lost and you feel that staying there is
completely pointless...
Step5: You have two options at this
point.
Step5A: You either make a last big
effort to get back your focus and in this way probably you can manage
to follow the lecture again for a short time. In this case you will
be happier but you will be probably totally exhausted afterwards. And
if the next day the training/lecture continues then you may start
directly from step3 and you may find yourself in a vicious circle of
step3-4-5. And I'm not really sure if this circle can be broken by a
pint of beer in the evening....
Step5B: The other option is to give
it up for that day. You just let it go. This won't make you
particularly happy that day but you have a good chance to recover
for the next day. OK, a beer would probably still help – at least
if you are having these experiences in Prague... :)
To make all these more 'scientific', I
also prepared a graph (with carefully chosen colours :) ) of these 5
steps. Dashed lines represent the case of applying Step5B
instead of Step5A.
Coming back to my training, it was a
2-day training and the first day I followed more Step5B, while the
second day more Step5A. And even though yesterday night I was really
tired, now I feel quite OK and in overall also quite satisfied ;)
At this point (assuming that you were
persistent enough to reach until here) you may be wondering what kind
of training I attended after all? So it was a training for PhimecaSoft,
the software developed by Phimeca (surprise!). It is based on python
and helps users to do fast and robust uncertainty calculations
including distribution analysis, building surrogate model, doing
reliability analysis and so on. One of the real strength of it that
it can be easily linked with models constructed with other software
such as ANSYS, ABAQUS, OpenFOAM etc. The long and short of it is that
it's really cool :) And the training was just this cool :) :
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