Monday, August 13, 2007
Rainbow
After most of June and July being a complete washout, the weather seems to be showing some signs of getting around to summer. This means that most showers are followed by bright sunshine - Emma and I spotted this while walking down South Street a few weeks ago.
Graduation and alumni weekend - a double header
The 29th June 2007 marked my second Durham graduation. I've written about how the first was a big let-down, so this time I wasn't expecting as much but it turned out really well. I met my parents in town and we went to Oldfields for lunch which was really nice - the food was great and we were there at the same time as Matt and his entourage and Nick from Engineering.
After that Matt and I walked over to Palace Green to gown up. For some reason they had a multitude of PhD gowns there, but only a select few sizes of hat - this resulted in Matt and I having hats that shifted around a lot over the afternoon. We filed over to the Castle where we met up with the other graduands - along with the other PhD and undergraduate chemists we were also paired with historians. The PhD chemists were split between those from my year who had managed to get submitted in time and those left over from the year before. This included Carl and Lue so there was a total of 4 Trevs' chemists getting their PhDs.
After we were paraded across to the cathedral we were seated in the EXTREMELY narrow seats. They were connected together but clearly weren't meant to be used by adults when in this configuration. With us all rammed in the temperature started to go up dramatically and the gowns and hats didn't help at all. As the ceremony started the historians were called up first. Once again it was quite fun to watch the different techniques used to shake Bill Bryson's hand. Some people looked embarrassed to be there and tried to get off the stage as quickly as possible without looking Bill in the face, others sneaked in the two-hand shake. As our cramped conditions became almost unbearable the historians seemed to keep on coming. Finally they were finished and attention turned to the chemists. Once again as we got ever-closer to the front of the queue the nerves began to appear - were our hats on straight (a new problem since the first graduation), how many steps were there and could we navigate them without falling over and most importantly of all you had to go up at the right moment
and hope they pronounced your name right. right. There were no major foul-ups and when we got back to the seats I decided to leave a spare seat to alleviate the cramped conditions. This seemed to throw a lot of people off as they weren't sat where they had been before. Bill Bryson gave his speech, which although funny was pretty short and apparently an almost word-for-word repeat of his speeches from previous years.
After we got out of the cathedral we all managed to stay in roughly the same place so we got in a lot of group photos and then we tracked down Bill Bryson and got our picture taken with him. We bumped in Maggie and our college tutor John which was nice and a lot of our chemistry friends turned up to see us. All in all it was a lot better than the chaos of 2003.
After this we bundled off the parents and handed back the gowns (our graduation was the last of the week so we couldn't wander around town in the gowns) and headed over to the New Inn. This day also marked the start of Trevs' alumni weekend so the New Inn slowly started filling up with familiar face from recent years. Eventually we dragged ourselves up the hill and into the bar. We got chatting to various people and after a few hours went out to experience Love Shack for the first time - it was pretty rammed and we didn't get back until about 3am. The next day brought the relief of brunch and then a free day until the formal. Alumni weekend is all about the drinking these days - the only events are the buffet in the bar on the Friday and the formal/late license on the Saturday. We turned up to the drinks reception and found a surprisingly large number of 1999 matriculants there.
We had a really good formal chatting to those around us at the table. Afterwards we slipped back into our old formal routine of mingling and chatting to people, dancing round the bar and ending up on the cobbles chatting to even more people. We had an amazing night and the best part was that although I had looked forward to seeing certain people - Matt, Mel, Alan, Brett and Sarah etc. it was really fun chatting to all those people that Matt and I used to chat to in the bar and formals like Gareth and Fran. It was really good to catch up with all those people that I will probably only hear from very rarely.
The next day, absolutely everyone I saw looked like death warmed up. Which was amusing. All in all the weekend was absolutely amazing and the only bad point was that it had to end. Roll on next year (although no more graduations for me now.)
After that Matt and I walked over to Palace Green to gown up. For some reason they had a multitude of PhD gowns there, but only a select few sizes of hat - this resulted in Matt and I having hats that shifted around a lot over the afternoon. We filed over to the Castle where we met up with the other graduands - along with the other PhD and undergraduate chemists we were also paired with historians. The PhD chemists were split between those from my year who had managed to get submitted in time and those left over from the year before. This included Carl and Lue so there was a total of 4 Trevs' chemists getting their PhDs.
After we were paraded across to the cathedral we were seated in the EXTREMELY narrow seats. They were connected together but clearly weren't meant to be used by adults when in this configuration. With us all rammed in the temperature started to go up dramatically and the gowns and hats didn't help at all. As the ceremony started the historians were called up first. Once again it was quite fun to watch the different techniques used to shake Bill Bryson's hand. Some people looked embarrassed to be there and tried to get off the stage as quickly as possible without looking Bill in the face, others sneaked in the two-hand shake. As our cramped conditions became almost unbearable the historians seemed to keep on coming. Finally they were finished and attention turned to the chemists. Once again as we got ever-closer to the front of the queue the nerves began to appear - were our hats on straight (a new problem since the first graduation), how many steps were there and could we navigate them without falling over and most importantly of all you had to go up at the right moment
and hope they pronounced your name right. right. There were no major foul-ups and when we got back to the seats I decided to leave a spare seat to alleviate the cramped conditions. This seemed to throw a lot of people off as they weren't sat where they had been before. Bill Bryson gave his speech, which although funny was pretty short and apparently an almost word-for-word repeat of his speeches from previous years.
After we got out of the cathedral we all managed to stay in roughly the same place so we got in a lot of group photos and then we tracked down Bill Bryson and got our picture taken with him. We bumped in Maggie and our college tutor John which was nice and a lot of our chemistry friends turned up to see us. All in all it was a lot better than the chaos of 2003.
After this we bundled off the parents and handed back the gowns (our graduation was the last of the week so we couldn't wander around town in the gowns) and headed over to the New Inn. This day also marked the start of Trevs' alumni weekend so the New Inn slowly started filling up with familiar face from recent years. Eventually we dragged ourselves up the hill and into the bar. We got chatting to various people and after a few hours went out to experience Love Shack for the first time - it was pretty rammed and we didn't get back until about 3am. The next day brought the relief of brunch and then a free day until the formal. Alumni weekend is all about the drinking these days - the only events are the buffet in the bar on the Friday and the formal/late license on the Saturday. We turned up to the drinks reception and found a surprisingly large number of 1999 matriculants there.
We had a really good formal chatting to those around us at the table. Afterwards we slipped back into our old formal routine of mingling and chatting to people, dancing round the bar and ending up on the cobbles chatting to even more people. We had an amazing night and the best part was that although I had looked forward to seeing certain people - Matt, Mel, Alan, Brett and Sarah etc. it was really fun chatting to all those people that Matt and I used to chat to in the bar and formals like Gareth and Fran. It was really good to catch up with all those people that I will probably only hear from very rarely.
The next day, absolutely everyone I saw looked like death warmed up. Which was amusing. All in all the weekend was absolutely amazing and the only bad point was that it had to end. Roll on next year (although no more graduations for me now.)
The working world
So it's been what - 9 weeks? I've been living the working life back up in Durham. For the first month I stayed with my former housemate Ollie in deepest darkest Gilesgate. Amazingly, following 5 years of being lazy (getting up-wise anyway) dragging myself up at 7.20am every morning hasn't been too bad. My journey to work only took 20 minutes, but half of that was simply getting from Gilesgate to the New Inn - from there it's fine. Straight away I joined up with my prospective housemates Emma and Barry to find some more permanent accommodation. We took in new town houses (all with problems despite being new). In the end we found a flat in the brand new apartments on South Street where the old city library used to be. For £66/week it's ours for 6 months - completely furnished (and we are taking plush here - LCD tv, dishwasher new beds and bedding). Sure enough there are some issues (no shower and the dishwasher has "issues") and the landlords are pretty slow but there haven't been any real problems yet. Parking is an issue, but my journey to work has been reduced to 15 minutes including a walk up the hill to my car.
The job. Well I'm sure it hits everybody when they first start a new job - I spent the first day thinking how much I hated it and how I was going to quit and go back to trying to get a lab-based job. Of course, these thoughts have just about passed and I now see it as a tremendous opportunity. To bring people who don't know up to speed, I'm working for Thorn Lighting (one of the UK and Europe's biggest lighting firms) in a small team (just 3 people!) alongside teams from Durham university (including my PhD supervisor) and Sumation from Cambridge/Japan to work out a path to bringing out a commercial white-light OLED. There's plenty of competition - in Europe there's Philips and Osram, in the US there's UDC, Eastman-Kodak and GE and in the Far East Konica-Minolta.
I'm starting to understand several things about how the real world works. Firstly it's absolutely full of people over-exaggerating everything. The reason for this is simple - money. If you are trying to get money out of someone for your project they are more likely to give it to you if you play up what your work could lead to. At the moment the in-thing in research grant applications is climate change - simply find a way of getting that phrase into a research proposal and people will fall over themselves to give you cash. In our case, apparently our team has "a substantial number of chemists and physicists" working on it - in reality we've got 2 and a half chemists and 3 physicists. Likewise when it comes to reporting results everyone will be very selectve about what they report - for example konica-minolta have reported a white-OLED with a luminous efficiency of 64 lm/W which is very good, but there is no mention of the lifetimes which leads us to believe that it simply dies after a few hours - not the most useful thing ever then. Our main European rivals, the Olla project, have showcased 15cm squared tiles of light, but on closer inspection you can tell it's made up from smaller panels.
Secondly, it's not what you know - it's who you know. A lot of our job seems to be networking with other people in the industry and keeping our fingers in various pies. It almost seems like our future careers depend on it. Our project has a budget of £3.3 million over 3 years, but other projects in the US and Europe are having millions poured into them fairly regularly. It seems fairly clear that our parent company, Zumtobel, isn't particularly interested in taking this project further than the initial 3 years. My guess is they'll listen to our report, but with new production plants costing over £10m they'll simply buy in products from other companies and our team will be cut loose. My aim is to move on to the company I originally wanted to work for: CDT/Sumation. Sumation is the name for the chemistry wing that is a joint venture between CDT and the Sumitumo chemical company of Japan. In fact, just a few weeks ago Sumitomo acquired the rest of CDT for $285m. The position of senior chemist seems like it would be ideal for me - input into the chemistry on all Sumations projects, the prospect of travelling to Japan for work exchanges and meetings, worldwide travel to various conferences and trade shows and being very visible in the OLED community that is becoming more important every year.
One of the benefits of having worked in Durham for so long is that I can see through all the BS we're being fed. The trouble we've got is that Sumation are banging out new materials at a rate of knots but they refuse to tell us what they are (and as a chemist that is really frustrating) where as Durham aren't quite as quick. Having worked alongside them for the last 4 years I know when they are taking us for a ride. I get the feeling there is a lot of sitting around going on. Academia simply wants to get in money and do the work they want to do and it's partially our job to make them do what we want them to do. Thankfully since they are so close to us we can easily keep an eye on them. It's sad that I've realised this as I used to think that industry was unreasonably demanding but it turns out that academia is fairly unfocussed. It means I can't look at academic research the same as before - sort of like how Christmas changes when you "know" about Father Christmas.
Moments of excitement so far: getting my corporate credit card (haha!), the team meetings (especially the meals out - the last one was at Bistro21), going anywhere in my boss' car (a beefy Volvo S80 that he frequently rags - 80mph in 3rd gear anyone?) and our trip over to Manchester in the company Zafirer - a naughty 1.9 turbo diesel estate that loves to cruise at 90...
So 9 weeks in and 50% of the time I'm really excited about the possibilities this job may lead to (both for the technology/science and my own career) and 50% of the time I'm bored cos we've don't have so much to do at the moment (hence these updates). I'll report more in due course. In the mean time, here's a partial team photo.
L-R Igor (Durham chemist), Tom (Sumation chemist), Torsten (Sumation chemist), Andy (Durham physics supervisor), Ben (Durham physicist just back from Singapore), me, Fernando (Durham physicist), Olivier (Thorn physicist) and Geoff (Thorn supervisor).
The job. Well I'm sure it hits everybody when they first start a new job - I spent the first day thinking how much I hated it and how I was going to quit and go back to trying to get a lab-based job. Of course, these thoughts have just about passed and I now see it as a tremendous opportunity. To bring people who don't know up to speed, I'm working for Thorn Lighting (one of the UK and Europe's biggest lighting firms) in a small team (just 3 people!) alongside teams from Durham university (including my PhD supervisor) and Sumation from Cambridge/Japan to work out a path to bringing out a commercial white-light OLED. There's plenty of competition - in Europe there's Philips and Osram, in the US there's UDC, Eastman-Kodak and GE and in the Far East Konica-Minolta.
I'm starting to understand several things about how the real world works. Firstly it's absolutely full of people over-exaggerating everything. The reason for this is simple - money. If you are trying to get money out of someone for your project they are more likely to give it to you if you play up what your work could lead to. At the moment the in-thing in research grant applications is climate change - simply find a way of getting that phrase into a research proposal and people will fall over themselves to give you cash. In our case, apparently our team has "a substantial number of chemists and physicists" working on it - in reality we've got 2 and a half chemists and 3 physicists. Likewise when it comes to reporting results everyone will be very selectve about what they report - for example konica-minolta have reported a white-OLED with a luminous efficiency of 64 lm/W which is very good, but there is no mention of the lifetimes which leads us to believe that it simply dies after a few hours - not the most useful thing ever then. Our main European rivals, the Olla project, have showcased 15cm squared tiles of light, but on closer inspection you can tell it's made up from smaller panels.
Secondly, it's not what you know - it's who you know. A lot of our job seems to be networking with other people in the industry and keeping our fingers in various pies. It almost seems like our future careers depend on it. Our project has a budget of £3.3 million over 3 years, but other projects in the US and Europe are having millions poured into them fairly regularly. It seems fairly clear that our parent company, Zumtobel, isn't particularly interested in taking this project further than the initial 3 years. My guess is they'll listen to our report, but with new production plants costing over £10m they'll simply buy in products from other companies and our team will be cut loose. My aim is to move on to the company I originally wanted to work for: CDT/Sumation. Sumation is the name for the chemistry wing that is a joint venture between CDT and the Sumitumo chemical company of Japan. In fact, just a few weeks ago Sumitomo acquired the rest of CDT for $285m. The position of senior chemist seems like it would be ideal for me - input into the chemistry on all Sumations projects, the prospect of travelling to Japan for work exchanges and meetings, worldwide travel to various conferences and trade shows and being very visible in the OLED community that is becoming more important every year.
One of the benefits of having worked in Durham for so long is that I can see through all the BS we're being fed. The trouble we've got is that Sumation are banging out new materials at a rate of knots but they refuse to tell us what they are (and as a chemist that is really frustrating) where as Durham aren't quite as quick. Having worked alongside them for the last 4 years I know when they are taking us for a ride. I get the feeling there is a lot of sitting around going on. Academia simply wants to get in money and do the work they want to do and it's partially our job to make them do what we want them to do. Thankfully since they are so close to us we can easily keep an eye on them. It's sad that I've realised this as I used to think that industry was unreasonably demanding but it turns out that academia is fairly unfocussed. It means I can't look at academic research the same as before - sort of like how Christmas changes when you "know" about Father Christmas.
Moments of excitement so far: getting my corporate credit card (haha!), the team meetings (especially the meals out - the last one was at Bistro21), going anywhere in my boss' car (a beefy Volvo S80 that he frequently rags - 80mph in 3rd gear anyone?) and our trip over to Manchester in the company Zafirer - a naughty 1.9 turbo diesel estate that loves to cruise at 90...
So 9 weeks in and 50% of the time I'm really excited about the possibilities this job may lead to (both for the technology/science and my own career) and 50% of the time I'm bored cos we've don't have so much to do at the moment (hence these updates). I'll report more in due course. In the mean time, here's a partial team photo.
L-R Igor (Durham chemist), Tom (Sumation chemist), Torsten (Sumation chemist), Andy (Durham physics supervisor), Ben (Durham physicist just back from Singapore), me, Fernando (Durham physicist), Olivier (Thorn physicist) and Geoff (Thorn supervisor).
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