Early Stage Researcher Neha Mehta tells us about the week at UDE – the final summer school of REMEDIATE…

What are you going to do after your PhD?
Are you thinking of industrial positions or are you in academia for the long haul?
When are you planning to defend your thesis?

Questions like these become part of the final year for every PhD student. Everyone from fellow PhDs to professors, from receptionists to the financial services section of our department, ask these questions. Half of our brain works on writing the thesis while the other half grapples between viva questions and interview preparations. It was in midst of these thoughts and preparations, that all of us attended the last REMEDIATE summer school at the University of Duisburg-Essen. This summer school provided us with an exciting opportunity to immerse ourselves in career growth aspects such as interview preparations, writing cover letters, and preparing for the job that we want, while also enhancing our scientific knowledge through sessions on modelling and site visits. The schedule contained a perfect blend of technical and soft skills and gave us chance to learn:

The Theory of Porous Media
Numerical models describing flow and transport of chemically active species in porous media can provide a powerful tool for analysing a wide variety of problems. For example, reactive transport models are used to predict the rate of migration of a contaminant plume resulting from heavy metal mobilization. To elaborate our understanding of contaminant transport we discussed continuum hypothesis, classical conservation equations of mass and energy, and introducing simplifications of the real physical systems to the model.

In all engineering problems, it will always be necessary to calibrate a model description to field data before making predictions. Evaluating field scale heterogeneities and variables necessitates close collaboration between modelling, experiments, and field observations.

Start preparing for a job
From submitting progress reports to writing scientific articles, from attending conferences and networking events to mentoring masters students, there are numerous tasks entailed in our PhD programme that lead to the development of skills that are required both for industrial and academic jobs. We should pay heed to these competencies and start preparing for the job we want.
In this session we focused on how to highlight our skills for the position we want in any sector. How to transition from academia to industry? What are good job search websites for job openings and possibilities? What mistakes should be avoided in our curriculum vitae? We learned that if we have our eyes set on a big, long term goal, the road ahead may not be straight.

Success career trajectories can have lots of zigzagging. We need to understand that there is more than just one model and more than just one path to reach a destination.

Defending your Doctoral thesis
So, I made it. Yeeeyyy! Years of hard work, culminating into one day. A PhD defence is a serious ceremony. In this session we learned the tricks and tips for defending our PhD thesis. We gained insights on the process and purpose of the viva, considered a range of viva questions and identified effective viva preparation strategies. We were also given the chance to look at mock viva questions in groups. A well written thesis along with presentation skills is king to a great viva experience. Nailing an excellent presentation of our work can be done with simple slides, timing, and flow in delivery.

On the defence day you are the expert in the room. Trust your brain. This is your day. No one in the world has recently spent the same length of time understanding this specific topic.

Site visit
To understand the impacts on groundwater due to coal mining, we visited the Hambach site. This open mining site is located in heart of a lignite mining area in North Rhine Westphalia. We saw the drainage water from the mining activities and also visited the extraction site. Everything at the mine appeared to be in a giant scale. We viewed the machines extracting coal and moving around sand and dirt. Everything from mine pit to machines transcended us to the world of science fiction movies.

Writing grant applications
In today’s cut-throat world of grants and research proposals, being an Early Career Researcher can feel daunting. During the session on grant applications, we learned the reasons behind writing grant applications. The writing procedure for grants should include simple language, balance between problems identified and solutions proposed, tell a story based on facts and visuals, and relate it to the goals of the funding organization.

The best grant proposals are simple, straightforward, and easily understood.

The summer school was such a great experience for every one of us involved, as not only was there time for lessons but also for enjoying the summer!

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Thanks, Web of Science!

This is how every one of us feels after finding a paper that describes a statistical approach to the experiments we are doing. Nanoseconds of utmost joy, a colossal amount of gratitude towards the author, the publisher, and Web of Science for sharing the knowledge. And what if the same concept is shared by someone to us through a talk? This knowledge sharing while giving appropriate examples from different  studies was done by the tutors at Summer School 2.
This summer school promised to hone our skills in statistical applications and paper writing. This was actually an understatement. The truth is that we were immersed in a captivating series of lectures, rewarding discussions, and individual study time to apply newly learned concepts to our own projects. Summer School gave us the chance to learn things like:

The importance of microbiology in risk assessment
Remediation of contaminated sites is a complex, lengthy, and costly procedure. To decide the remediation goals, it thus becomes imperative to understand the risks to human health and environment due to contaminants. Most of the environmental risk assessment framework used for decision making at present only accounts for chemical analysis. It seems equally important to understand the health of soil in terms of the microorganisms; the effect of metal content on the growth and development of microorganism colonies, as much as knowing the total metal concentration and their bioavailability. To further elaborate our understanding on the subject we visited the Collstrop site to see how different contaminants may cause risk to environment.

Environmental risk assessment methods should try to reveal the soil health in terms of ecology, toxicity, and chemical analysis as defined in the TRIAD approach.

Paper writing skills
Correcting one report, modifying the next; hopping from one experiment to another; meandering from one university to a different university for a secondment; presenting a poster, giving an oral presentation; preparing a to-do list to glancing at a done list; scheduling ICP-MS time to learning SEM; running a code on R to installing MATLAB: life is always a roller-coaster. Amidst all this, one thought that keeps on popping into our brains: AM I GOOD AT WRITING?
The problem was solved by the session on paper writing that told us that every researcher should first identify themselves as a writer. How a simple thing like saving the bibliography in a separate folder for the article we are working on right now, can save a lot of time. The introduction should always follow a funnel approach and we should first start working on the body of the article were some of the tips shared to make writing easier.

Like all things that are worthwhile, it takes time to publish; it also gets easier with practice. So don’t wait any longer. Start writing that paper now.

Presentation Skills
This time we had a project meeting just before the summer school. Every presentation was recorded on a video camera. Supervisors were given a form to comment on the presentation skills of the ESRs.
Ohhh no… I did not rehearse… you did not tell us… this is not fair, we just came yesterday night and did not get a proper sleep. Yes, this is how we all reacted to the idea of Julie-Anne and Nick. But we had a sigh of relief, when these forms and videos were shown to us again in groups and we had chance to discuss among ourselves on how we can improve. There was no mentor, no supervisor telling us we were right or wrong. We were all friends set on a mission to improve ourselves, to help each other, looking at videos, eating the evening snacks and telling each other.

We may have discovered a simple procedure to help in the remediation of brownfield sites, now we should get out there and tell everyone.

Discipline
Preparing for next set of experiments in lab at night to submitting a report in wee hours of morning. We all have control of our schedules. One of the biggest benefit of being a PhD student is that we have all the freedom to plan our day according to the workload. In such a scenario, we often fall out of daily routine.
So here came lessons on discipline. Summer School was organised at away from the hub-bub of Copenhagen. So if we woke up late and missed the breakfast, there was no 7Eleven nearby. Lunch timings and dinner timings were fixed. Finishing dinner till 7:00 pm led to a situation when some of us were running in night, starving and looking in each other’s room for food. This is how we were all given a chance to live a healthy life. Waking up early to attend lectures, going for long walks to see deers and stroll on the beach in the evening, getting to sleep on time kept us motivated and energetic throughout. It was also important for inculcating self discipline.

Self discipline is when your conscience tells you to do something and you don’t talk back.
W.K. Hope

Statistical methods and application of R
Hovering a cursor from MS Word to MS Excel; writing an email, to using Mendeley for managing my bibliography; plotting maps on QGIS, to using SURFER for interpolating the data: we forget to pay heed to R, or to any statistcial software for that matter.
Somehow, everything that we forget or do not pay attention to, was included in the program of Summer School. The session on application of R taught us about writing code and data analysis using linear regression method, Principal Component Analysis and clustering approaches.

Statistical methods provide us with the conceptual foundations in quantitative reasoning to extract information from the sea of data.

Team Building
Missing a call from one of our fellow researchers, replying late on WhatsApp; looking at our Facebook feed, finding out about our friend’s achievement through Researchgate: there are multiple occasions when we find ourselves guilty of not remaining in touch with our friends. When an interdisciplinary project has students in five different countries, this is something that is bound to happen. To make the bonds of friendship stronger, no stones were left unturned by the organisers. We spent one of our evenings at Dyrehavsbakken Amusement Park. It is the world’s oldest amusement park. Pedaling cycles to the park, holding each other’s hands on a horror ride, shouting together in another ride gave a joyful refreshment to our friendship.

Away from the city, in a lush green location, learning from people who know their subject down to the minutest detail. Lessons not just on science, but on every aspect of being a successful researcher, was definitely a wonderful experience.

While mapping locations of samples on my computer, I found myself sitting and pondering the last sampling trip. I have been on many trips in the last year, for collecting mining waste dotted over mountains, for working with soil near the waste, and to collect water samples (to find out if the water was using perseverance and hard work to slowly dissolve the metals around it and carry them large distances, or if the metals were loyal enough to remain attached to the rocks and not fall in love with ions in the water).

Sampling feels different in different seasons, and this was first time I had done it in the autumn. I went with Giorgio and we were joined by Scolari (an employee from Comune di Gorno, Lombardy). We were there to sample water springs and water from mining tunnels that would reflect the level of metals in the background and in contaminated water.

When I got out of our car, I could see colours in the mountains that were not evident when I had come earlier in the year. Apparently it was views like this that made the author Jim Bishop write “Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.”

How meticulously nature paints itself. When I was taking pictures of the sample site, I could not stop myself taking photographs of mountains and the paths decorated by leaves.

The ecstatic feeling soon disappeared when I started walking in the mountains to collect samples. The leaves and water made some of the locations slippery and so scary that we were all walking like tortoises even with proper shoes. Leaves that hide holes beneath them; leaves on plants and around that hide the water source itself. I kept on repeating to myself “Slow and steady wins the race, slow and steady wins the race” as if it was only this hymn that was saving us and our instruments from falling down; and we kept on walking.

The area had a plethora of flora and fauna: we came across cats, dogs, horses, big and small mushrooms, a donkey, salamanders, goats, and cows grazing on surrounding fields, appearing here and there and sometimes walking with us until either of us changed path, as if they were keeping us company in our work that could lead to the betterment of not just human life but also the local environment, perhaps thinking ‘How weird these human beings are, they do not know how to walk properly even with shoes!’ or maybe just looking at us and getting busy in their chores again.

At this point someone reading this might wonder if I was collecting samples or taking photographs. Where are the samples? Where are photos of sampling locations? In case you failed to notice, look again at the pictures. The team walked to long narrow tunnels used for underground mining of zinc and lead.

The tunnels have their own stories on how men used to drill along the tunnels and cut the rocks, and women used to segregate the rocks with minerals from other rocks. Tunnels that silently roar ‘Oh you! You are also one of those who want to have everything, but do you really stop for a moment and try to imagine the effects of mining on workers, the backbreaking work and the precision through which it passed; the chemicals that were used to wash those rocks?’ How neophiliac and shortsighted we really are: we look at something, buy it, use it, and forget it. It cannot go on.

Someone like me must come and show the pictures, trigger the cognitive process again, shout if we are not paying heed. No matter how much we try to overlook our footprints and try to remain caged inside our own comfort zones there will be something which will come in different forms in front of us. Therefore, we need to find answers for our own benefit, for ourselves to have peaceful sleep in night. We cannot leave all kind of marks on earth and go on Mars or the moon to live happily ever after! I was experiencing centuries in a few minutes and using knowledge of every discipline I have come across. History, chemistry, geography, geology and environmental engineering were all in my head.

Then I suddenly remembered words of wisdom from my mentor Professor Domenico De Luca: “Neha, passo dopo passo [step by step]! When you get emotional while you are doing research, remember just one mantra. Take a deep breath and move forward with just one step. Do not think too much and keep on taking every small step you can.”

After all the conversations inside me stopped, I took the smallest step I could take at that moment, and continued measuring electrical conductivity, the temperature and other physiochemical qualities of water.

Here are some bonus pictures from the sampling trip. Do not forget the lesson… ONE SMALL STEP !!!

Celebrating Diwali with Crackers of Laughter !!!

Coming out of India for studies to a place so far was something that was unimaginable for me and my family even after I arrived in Torino. Although I have had lived in different parts of India but still I had never celebrated Diwali out of my home. I used to go to my parents on Diwali irrespective of anything. And they also knew that I would be with them cleaning home, making sweets at home, sharing household work with my mother, lighting Diyas, going to temples and squares near to my home to light Lamp there and planning all nitti gritties of the celebration.

But this time it was different, they had bid me good bye just before ten days of Diwali knowing that I am not going to celebrate with them. And here I was in a city which has everything to offer- parks, piazzas and bars still there was something that my eyes kept on searching. There was something that told that I was out of India. I was somehow not at peace with myself. I was settling in my work life partly because being a Researcher was a dream that I had from a long time and also because I had colleagues who were easy to get along with. But life outside my lab was becoming tough with every passing day. I started missing my home more and more as the days passed. I dreaded being lonely on evening of Diwali, being engulfed in the darkness of my own sadness.

And then finally the day when Lord Rama returned to Ayodhya in the History arrived. Everyone was wishing me Happy Diwali on WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook and through variety of Forums while I was working in my Lab on a presentation with my tutor. So the day passed without much difficulty, discussing with my guide. In the evening after my work when I went to kitchen of the University Residence to prepare Coffee I met another student. I almost burst out with tears in my eyes telling her that today is Diwali and I am here. To my surprise she knew about Diwali as she was an exchange student from UK and knew many Indians there. While having conversation we decided to call other students also and to have dinner together.

When we were preparing dinner together I came to know that everyone belonged to different country and culture. Yet all of us were gaily, sharing recipes of food, talking about Shahrukh khan, Katrina Kaif ( yes they knew about Bollywood also ) one girl from Morocco was a big fan of Shahrukh Khan and told me that she watches every movie of Shahrukh Khan and has watched DDLJ for incalculable number of times. We were chatting about reason behind Diwali celebration, Manipal University, about life in Europe and Asia in general, conversing about history of Italy, contributing our own thoughts on different religions. Soon Diwali was full of Crackers of Laughter, lights of smile on our faces and radiating eyes and good food on our plates. Barriers between Jain, Muslims and Christians were meaningless and there was unity in diversity. All of us were together like different spices in food making it delicious with every next bite.

That moment I started loving Torino with all of my heart for giving me an opportunity to meet such nice people and stopped my search. I started being happy after lab also and meeting new people. Every day after that was livable. And so my own Vanvas ended with Diwali.