Tuesday 25 April 2017

3.5 weeks commencing 1st April...

Did, er, anyone see where April went? One minute I was writing a quick second post for the end of March, and the next thing I know, it's the 24th of April. I'll need to post twice this week if I want to hit my two-posts-a-month goal!

It has been a busy month, quite aside from a PhD viva, a workshop for the Tracking People network, a family trip to Paris and Easter, my time has mostly gone on a Horizon 2020 funding proposal. It's a lot of work: five academic institutions (with three academics at Leeds) and two companies, all needing to co-ordinate. We've been working on it in earnest for two months, but this month everything has had to be nailed down. No more speculation, or "well, we could do this" - it has to be firmed up.

And there are lots of dependencies. You aren't ploughing lone furrows here: milestones need to match, you need to be on the same page when it comes to how technology is going to fit together, and decisions create ripples across the project. It's a lot of work, but I've rather warmed to the process. If nothing else, it at least forces you to prove you can work together, and it's better to iron out these issues before you get committed to delivery.

Of course, proposal writing is never wasted: it pushes your thinking forwards, it creates new networks, it gives (at least in my case!) experience of a very different grant writing process. It's been hard work,  but productive, even if the project doesn't get funded. Apart from anything else, it's made me glad of two things: that I wasn't co-ordinator (hats off to Nasrine Olson and Jonas Andersson for that formidable duty!) and that we have a hugely supportive admin and finance team here at Leeds. I really hope it comes off: you get very invested in these things, and challenges that start out as "How on earth will we do this?" become "I can't wait to do this!"

All of which is pretty abstract: one doesn't like to give detail away, since we might want to reuse bits elsewhere if unsuccessful. Suffice to say it would build upon the WHISPER haptic navigation project we did last year.

It feels a bit abrupt to shift gears to other things again. Builds of PSAT are coming together, I've a workshop to plan for the Tracking People network in June, thirty portfolios to mark, dissertations to assess, a studentship to interview for, two papers to revise, and more reach to grasp modelling to do.

Oh, and another blog post to write this week.

No rest for the wicked, eh?

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