At my university in Ecuador, we have a collaboration with Coursera for faculty and students. The program for faculty gives faculty a Coursera license for one semester to take courses and get certificates for their professional development. The program for…
For anybody interested in trying out the reflection workshop I designed for myself - you can find it in today's post. I'm sharing here what I had originally prepared. In the end, I did not have time or energy to…
I enjoy reading quite some, as long-term readers of this blog know (I read over 110 books last year, after all). So, I recently did some triaging of my favorite non-fiction books to generate some lists of book recommendations. Here…
I recently organized a think day for myself to outline the next steps in my career. If you are somewhere midcareer like me, and thinking about the next steps, this approach may be insightful. Here's the outline of the think…
It is at times hard for professors to carve out time to take a step back and think about the broader picture. Following Bill Gates' example with his "Think Weeks," I've scheduled monthly meetings with myself for deep thinking about…
Last year, I was invited to try for election as Vice President of IABSE, the Internationla Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering. In total, we were five candidates for three positions (the organization has 11 Vice Presidents, each with their…
I'm coming down from a particularly heavy semester, in which I have had a few weeks of 70+ hours, while still having to make the 4pm pickup at school. Things have been particularly rough, in other words, and I was…
As I've been writing about teaching and active learning in previous posts, I thought that for today special attention to graduate-level courses is due. At times, it may seem harder to put elements of active learning into upper-level courses, as…
This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands. These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those…
As always, I'm here with a brief post outlining my goals for the upcoming semester. Here's what I will be focusing on: Submit 4 papers. Develop a plan for a delayed PhD thesis. Analyze skewed slab tests. Redesign MSc course…
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