Evaluation of my Fall 2025 goals
As always at the end of the semester, I am here to check how I did with my goals of the semester:
- Submit 4 papers: 7 – including R1s and papers of my students
- Submit EU proposal in November as lead, provided I get the internal knowledge security OK – Yes, I managed to submit that proposal as lead
- Work on two EU proposals that have other leads – No, for one the consortium did not gel, and the other got postponed to 2026
- Draft another EU proposal that is due in February – I’m working on the draft, but I’m not sure if I’ll get all the consortium partners to fulfill the requirements
- Submit internal funding proposal – Yes, and it got rejected :/
- Teach undergraduate Bridge Design course in a COIL – Yes! Looking forward to receiving the student evaluations
- Work on next deliverables of EU project – Moving slowly
- Plan the defense of my PhD student – Yes, time and date are scheduled!
- Start a new project (hopefully – I really need something to come through to cover my hours) – The letter of assignment of the project came through very recently! I finally got a good project to fund my research in the next two years.
- Finalize load testing project 2 – Yes, signed, billed, and done!
- Get funding for 2026 – One project approved. I’m hoping to get something else, so that more of my hours are covered.
- Bench 80kg, deadlift 140kg, squat 120kg – working on it! I started to struggle halfway through this training cycle so I took it a bit slower, but hope to hit those PRs before the end of the year (they stand at 77.5 kg for bench, 135 kg for deadlift, and 112.5 kg for squat at the moment).
- Submit to a poetry competition – I actually got my poetry published in a museum in Tongeren in Belgium and accepted for publication in an online magazine.
- Organize my daughter’s extracurricular activities for the year (and the logistics around these) – Yes, that needs to happen anyway 🙂
All in all, I struggled a bit with consortium requirements for all proposals I have been working on, but some good things have come through at the end of the semester.