Evaluation of my Fall 2023 goals

At the end of every semester, I look back and reflect on my goals of the past semester, and what I achieved.

So, let’s have a look at how I did in terms of my Fall 2023 goals:

• Submit 4 papers: If you count conference papers, then I did submit a fair number of things – but I have been making only slow progress on my journal papers.
• Have the first draft of the thesis of one of my PhD students. Yes! If all goes well, the defense will be in February.
• Submission of the thesis of my other PhD student. Not yet – we will be making a new plan in January.
• Teach a new graduate class. Yes, and it was a lot of work.
• Receive a secondment for EU project. This happened, and it was a great experience.
• Experiments in Ecuador. The first series and first results are done. Progress was a bit slower as we have new equipment to learn how to work with.
• Submit a proposal for funding with colleagues in Switzerland. Submitted and fingers crossed.
• Career document that I will explain later. Submitted and fingers crossed.
• Measurement report of the skewed slab tests. The report is partially done, as we had delays in the lab.
• Report of the fire project. We’ve delivered various reports for this project.

All in all, I had a heavy teaching semester (with some courses I took as well for my professional development), which left limited time for writing papers. Research projects moved forward, some deliverables were wrapped up and others delayed, and no major problems happened along the way. I’ll call it a reasonable success.