I’m working on the project, “inferring ocean turbulent mixing from tracer observations” under the supervision of Dr. Laura Cimoli
About me
In September I will be starting the 4th and final year of the MMath programme at the University of Nottingham.
I am planning to do a PhD after my studies, and I’m trying to decide between two quite different fields: astrophysical fluid dynamics and climate science. Before fully committing to one, I wanted to get experience in both fields. Since my dissertation is going to be in relativistic hydrodynamics, I decided to intern with ICCS to get a feel of what climate research looks like.
Typical Day
One of the pros of research is that working hours are more flexible than in other industries. Generally I try to stick to the canonical office hours, just to give myself a routine. So I usually start at 9/9:30, take a lunch break of an hour/an hour and a half, and then keep working until around 5:30. It might be a little later if I feel like I’m in the middle of something. After work I usually go to the gym, and then go home and relax for the evening. When I don’t manage to complete everything I had to get done by the end of the week, I’ll work for a couple of hours on the weekend.
Learning Point
After getting stuck for weeks, I finally got to the point of the project where I started to see results. I was looking forward to seeing how the physics would play out so this was really exciting. Since I never had the chance to do much data analysis at university, this project has been an opportunity to learn a new skill. I feel like research has somewhat of a creative component, and letting the stress get to your head will affect your work. I’ve thus learnt a huge lesson: to try not to let the frustration prevent you from thinking outside of the box.