02 - 1st TRUSS Training Week, the University of Nottingham, Mon 30th Nov - Fri 4th Dec, 2015

Hey crew! How are you?

I hope you have had a nice Christmas holidays with your family and I wish that a happy new year has started for you!

Have you ever been visiting Chatsworth?

You will probably say you have never heard about it before.

Actually, me neither, I never heard about it till one month ago.

Just know that Chatsworth House is a stately home in Derbyshire and it is one hour and a half by bus from Nottingham. It is the seat of the Duke of Devonshire and has been home to the Cavendish family since 1549.

Standing on the east bank of the River Derwent, Chatsworth looks across to the low hills that divide the Derwent and Wye valleys. The house, set in expansive parkland and backed by wooded, rocky hills rising to heather moorland, contains a unique collection of priceless paintings, furniture, Old Master drawings, neoclassical sculptures, books and other artefacts. Chatsworth has been selected as the United Kingdom's favourite country house several times.

You can get more information about it in Wikipedia searching for ‘Chatsworth House’ or directly visiting the official web site of the estate at www.chatsworth.org. Maybe you will have time to visit and enjoy it during the weekend. It will be a nice trip.

Why am I talking about Chatsworth House on my blog? Because I visited it. Actually, I visited it at the beginning of December with all the other ESRs candidates. We had a sort of “school trip” all together!

As I already mentioned, TRUSS is a training network. This basically means that it is more than a normal PhD course: it is to learn what research is, it is to understand how to be an effective researcher and it is to understand how research projects are actually related to industry and companies. So, it is to achieve soft skills which can introduce the ESRs candidates to their future career in academy but also in industry. One of the reasons I chose to apply for it is that I think TRUSS is a complete training: I thought TRUSS might be the training I needed for my future career.

As part of its education process, TRUSS periodically organizes meetings between the ESRs and their Supervisors so that they can exchange knowledge, ideas, suggestions, observations and information. Sometimes those meetings are surrounded by short courses and they last a week. In this case they are called “Training Weeks” and they usually take place every six months hosted by one of the involved institutions.

The 1^st TRUSS Training Week was hosted by the University of Nottingham. It took place from the 30^th November to the 4^th December 2015 and it included the trip to Chatsworth as part of the training. It was one month ago more or less.

During the week, very nice activities and educational games were organized in order to strength the cohesion between the ESRs.

Brief introductions about methods of safety and structural safety quantification, life cycle assessment and reliability analysis, about fault diagnostic methods, on how to plan research, about team working and presentation skills, materials and load modelling among others have been issued.

The trip to Chatsworth was part of this first interesting training week. It was one of the nice experiences organized in order to strength friendship and ‘team working’ between the ESRs. The fact is that we never met before so I think that the trip was a pleasant opportunity to know each other better. It was nice to see that on the second day we met the group was already strong enough to have fun all together for the entire day kidding and laughing together while visiting the manor.

Finally, I would like to say thank you to TRUSS and to the University of Nottingham for organizing that, to the Professors and researchers that participated to the event and to all the ESRs for the time we spent together.

Seriously, I enjoyed this experience and I’m more and more convinced that by choosing to apply for this training I made the right choice for my life. I really look forward to participate to the next training week!

In the next post we will discuss about the references I’m taking into account for my literature review. So, thank you for your attention and as usual: stay tuned!

FP13