First post!

Thought it was about time to join a blog, many years after the inception of them. I hope that one day this can be useful or entertaining to people - I shall try to blog regularly about what is going on here.

Seeing at this is the first post I figure that I should first of all introduce myself! My name is Dave and I am a first year PhD student at the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. I graduated in 2010 with an undergraduate masters (MEng) degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Sheffield. I wanted to pursue further studies, and what better place in the UK (or even the world) than the University of Cambridge?

I was very late in applying for a PhD - around June/July time. I was whisked down to Cambridge for an "informal interview" (which I still wore a suit to - this is Cambridge after all!) and met the (then) Head of Department, (now Pro-Vice Chancellor) Professor Lynn Gladden. I was very interested in what they do down here and she seemed to think that I wasn't quite as daft as a brush (closer to a comb I think) and very generously offered to supervise me and gave me a stipend to carry out my PhD here, entitled Development of CFD Codes to Predict Two-Phase Flows and Reaction in Trickle-Bed Reactors. This involves developing software to predict the way that fluids flow and interact with each other - very challenging and demanding, and just what I need to kick my work up a notch.

At the start of my tenure I met Professor Stewart Cant, who is a world-renowned expert in the field of computational engineering, who is my second supervisor. Stewart has many years of experience in the field of CFD and computational engineering, with his SENGA code for direct numerical simulation of combustion chemistry an international standard. On top of it all, he is a very amiable chap - I think best summed up by a description of him (by a person who shall remain unnamed!) as "the supervisor who makes me smile at difficult problems, and whose office I leave with a sense of purpose and determination instead of dejection and confusion." I meet Stewart every Wednesday, and always feel energised and ready for more hard work afterwards. Probably a useful time in the week to have the meeting too!

In the first half of this year I have been getting to grips with the CFD code NEWT, which is an in-house code used at the Department of Engineering. I've been using it to compute some single-phase flows (i.e. just liquid flowing through a column) and have achieved some good results with it. I've got a hold of some MRI data from the Chem. Eng connections and compared it, finding remarkably good agreement in the region of 2-9% accuracy. I'm coming to the end of drafting an academic manuscript on the work and hope to submit it soon.

Doing a PhD, in my very brief experience, feels very much like climbing a lighthouse where the stairs are all huge. You start at the bottom and slowly work your way up the winding stairs, and inevitably you run into problems. These are both external (waiting for someone else to do something that you need) and internal, and perhaps it is the latter of these that defines the difference between a postgrad programme and a PhD one. If I encounter some problem here it is really up to me to sort it out, whether it is software-related, maths-related or science-related. Of course there is help, but no-one can just spoon-feed you the information any more; you've got to kick up to a higher gear in order to manage to jump to the next step. Unfortunately though there are hundreds of steps left to go!

The support that you have is key, and Cambridge is a wonderful place in this regard. Whether the support is from fellow PhD students, supervisors or other academics working in your department, I've always received very insightful and positive criticism from whomever I've spoken to. Without wishing to present my old University as the opposite, I've always felt at Sheffield that the faculty was somewhat split by "factions" and that it wouldn't have been the best place to pursue a PhD. Here in Cambridge everyone is at the top of their games, and there's a lot of collaboration - you can really see why the University of Cambridge continues to be  a world-leader today.

I've gone on too long here so I shall sign off now on an increasingly-cloudy April day - hopefully it will rain a little later on as the Robinson College gardens smell incredibly good after a blanket of rain. The squirrels don't like the wet weather too much though!

Dave