{"id":1051,"date":"2021-03-10T10:13:51","date_gmt":"2021-03-10T09:13:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/?p=1051"},"modified":"2021-03-10T10:13:51","modified_gmt":"2021-03-10T09:13:51","slug":"stalemate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/2021\/03\/10\/stalemate\/","title":{"rendered":"Stalemate"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Following the input from the <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/2021\/01\/06\/rating-conferences\/\">Rating Conferences that I wrote about in the last blog<\/a> the MSc curriculum revision project team found ourselves going around in circles:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Core courses or not? And if so how many? And what makes a course &#8220;core&#8221;?<\/li>\n<li>Specializations or not? Or Minors? (And is there a difference?)<\/li>\n<li>More breadth or more depth? More science or more engineering? More fundamental or more modern? More structure or more freedom?<\/li>\n<li>Which brought us back to core courses or not? and around we went again.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>To break the deadlock, <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.ethz.ch\/department\/people\/person-detail.MTYwNjg1.TGlzdC8yNTQzLC0xNjM2MjE2MDE=.html\">Lucio<\/a> suggested we all go away and design our ideal MSc study plan, which we would then share to see if we reached a consensus. While I was a bit skeptical by this stage that I would ever be able to agree even with myself about this, I didn&#8217;t have a better suggestion. So I spent the next rainy Saturday curled up on the sofa in my pyjamas contemplating what I would most like to learn about if I had a year or two without lots of committees. (Irrelevant aside, which I know I&#8217;ve grumbled about before: If you are old, half-way reasonable and not male, you are really, really popular for committees).<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m a big fan of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thomasyoungcentre.org\">Thomas Young Centre for the Theory and Simulation of Materials<\/a> in London &#8212; they&#8217;re an interdisciplinary network of around 100 research groups from four London Colleges (Imperial, King&#8217;s, Queen Mary University and University College London) all interested in materials modeling &#8212; so I decided to snoop around the website of their Doctoral School. To my delight, I found my dream MSc, on Theory and Simulation of Materials, sitting right there.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.imperial.ac.uk\/theory-and-simulation-of-materials\/msc-\/\">Theory and Simulation of Materials MSc course<\/a>, based at Imperial College, is a 12-month, 90-credit point course that provides a foundation in theoretical materials physics and its applications in simulations across length and time scales. Nice! There&#8217;s not much flexibility; courses are required in seven core subjects, from which four are chosen to continue in more depth. But given the topics &#8212; mathematics, equilibrium, transformations, electronic structure, field theory, simulations and computational and numerical methods &#8212; I would hate to have to leave something out! I fiddled with the numbers a bit and added another research project to bring the credit points up to 120 then submitted my homework to our studies coordinator, <a href=\"https:\/\/mat.ethz.ch\/department\/people\/management-and-administration.html\">Sara<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately for those of you who are horrified by the idea of a year and a half of materials modeling, the draft curricula of the other project team members were entirely different from mine and very similar to each other. We quickly converged to a concept of 30 credits of core courses, composed of &#8220;substantial&#8221; courses (that is more than just a couple of credits) from within the Materials Department, a similar number of broadly defined electives, of which half could form a minor emphasis, rounded out by projects and internships plus the ETH-required &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/gess.ethz.ch\/en\/studies\/science-in-perspective.html\">Science in Perspective<\/a>&#8220;.<\/p>\n<p>So what&#8217;s next? Well, Sara put together a summary based on these ideas, which will be shared with the Materials Department teaching commission at its meeting on March 18th. I&#8217;m sure there will be a lot of animated discussion and useful feedback, that I hope will move us forward rather than round in more circles&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following the input from the Rating Conferences that I wrote about in the last blog the MSc curriculum revision project team found ourselves going around in circles: Core courses or not? And if so how many? And what makes a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/2021\/03\/10\/stalemate\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":159,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-materials-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/159"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/nicolaspaldin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}