Greetings,

after strolling in this "PhD school", i realize many topics are not directly nor related to PhD. Only few topics really make sense. So may i know how many ppl here actually doing PhD? may i know in which university and your research interest? So that, we could actually discuss PhD topics and your research topics and hereby make this thread more "reliable" source for graduate students and for those interested to do PhD in future.

cheers


btw, if im not mistaken, Bro azriamy is a PhD holder in Education. am i right?

You got the wrong assumption. Its just a catchy name for a subforum. It doesnt serve mainly for phd level discussion.

Same like asking the people in "cupid corner" section, how many of the members are cupids? and how many had given cupid-quality replies to the threads there?

azriamy is doing his phd in architecture..he's a lecturer in UTM...
How about TS start the ball rolling by letting us know your details 1st?

owh, so its just a catchy name. Well my bad then.


@highwind85, architecture? cool, yeah now i do remember he mentions about archie stuff. Well for me, im just recently doing my PhD in Nottingham Malaysia, my focus is on Artificial Intelligence. Gonna use Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) or Kalman Filtering, basically i will use these methods to predict disaster before it happens. My focus more on landslides and concrete structures (deformations on concrete structures like what happened in MRR2). Basically will use those method to monitor and predict when the disaster will struck so we could warn the community.

Well that a brief about my topic. Hopefully if anyone have related topics, we could discuss about it.

and yes, i would like to know about other ppl research interest as well, what they doing, how they gonna do it and such. =)

btw does anyone have motivational movie suggestion? sometimes its really easy to get de-motivated when doing phd. haha

Nice project..
I am a 1st year PhD student at Australian National University..My research area is protein engineering and crystallography..
My main methods for protein engineering are directed evolution which mimics the process of protein evolution and rational design..
These methods are used to improve enzyme properties and for my case predict bacterial antibiotic resistance uprising...

That is cool man, from few reading on net, it seems there is two way for protein engineering? rational design and directed evolution. So correct me if im wrong, u are currently working on directed evolution to mimics rational design way of working?

Im abit blur on these, hahaha im pretty bad with bio n chem. But your topic sounds cool, d purpose is to improve enzyme properties for antibiotic resistance right? So far how your PhD man? Im gonna admit, im kinda stuck at Kalman Filtering for a month here, doing matlab codes on my own, to work with multidimensional Kalman Filtering. Sigh sometimes, well not sometimes, most of d times, i feel kinda noob and stupid. lolz my frens sed, its normal in PhD life, u will always feel like an idiot when learn about some new stuff, and when no one around to teach, its easy to be misled if reading materials are not sufficient (which is in my case) haha.

3rd year PhD student here. I'm from Streeling University doing research in Pyschohistory. Working on a statistical predictive analysis on collective human behavior based on specific events. I should be coming out with my probability set soon enough.

haha...not quite right..directed evolution mimics the process of evolution where mutations occurs randomly whereas rational design is the mutation you do the the DNA with the desired mutation...central dogma of gene expression is DNA->RNA->protein..so the mutation would translate into the protein..

protein engineering generally is to improve enzyme properties...such as better thermostability, better solubility, or substrate preference...
For my case..i'm investigating the uprising of bacterial resistance towards antibiotic...the enzyme responsible for most of the resistance is beta-lactamses..
But they have different activity towards different antibiotics..so my job is to predict how would the enzyme evolve so that the data could be used in designing new antibiotic drug by chemistry people..



This post has been edited by highwind85: Jun 6 2010, 07:03 PM

Streeling University.

yeah..nothing came up except Striling University in Scotland...
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=U...ling+University

Haha. Okay, I'm done pulling your leg here. Streeling University is a fictional institute in The Foundation Series from Isaac Asimov. So is psychohistory.

I am a 3rd year PhD student for real though. Monah University (Sunway branch), dealing with a semantic form of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping based on Tamura Textures.

It's boring s--t, though. I totally wish I really could do Psychohistory.

haha...you got me...

Didn't turn out like how I planned, anyways. Sorry about that.

Anyway, for spikyz. You're not alone in feeling dumb and stupid. I felt that for the whole 3 years I've been here. And since my supervisor isn't one of the more "popular" ones around here, I've been doing my research all by myself as well. The rest of my PhD colleagues get to confer with each other once in a while.

Gee, thx for the introduction to the lonely world of PhD. Well, I'm just curious to what was/is your reason to pursuing your PhD? Is it for promotions, purely academic interest, or a geeky way to pickup chicks?
I do intend on pursuing my masters, mainly because I miss studying. Working for 5 years makes you wish you were back in university doing your thesis and project presentation. I don't know about PhD yet. Unless there is a significant chance of promotion for PhD holders, I probably would only conider PhD if I'm planning to be a uni lecturer someday.

God, I totally wish doing a PhD would get me chicks. Maybe if I did my research in The Mystery Method, maybe.

With a Masters, you'd most likely improve your chances at employment, but doing a PhD pretty much means you'll be either in the academic or research line. You'd be overqualified for a "regular" job in the corporate sector, and it would have been a waste of time doing a doctorate anyways.

Doing my PhD cause I absolutely love lecturing. Hate research though, but that *might* change once I graduate and get to research on what I like, rather than just choosing the best out of a very limited pool.

Plus, I like waking up at whatever time I like. And the student life.

Hahah im in abit blur state when u describing your stuff there, i quite understand abit here and there, but not the full thing. But it sounds awesome bro!


Monah university? lolz another prank here? hehe Monash Uni rite? i been there for a Chess tournament, few few years back

hahah, i understand that "popular" situation...my prof could consider one of the popular one, but he has around 13 PhD students under him (full time and part time) So most of the time i felt like left out. Hahaha plus it seems he attracted more to girls project jk jk


Lonely world of PhD..agree on this.. mainly bcoz u do your stuff which not many ppl in the world doing it.. and when u talk to ppl, if get into d details it seems nobody could understand u.. haha an advantage/disadvantage depends on which view u look at it. Well for promotions? i would say erk...to what level u will be promote? haha Dr->Prof? for chicks? well i dont think bimbo girls will fall into u, however u will attract the sophisticated and smart girls most of d time

my reason is, i done internship in my first , second and final year in uni, 3 summer breaks and with 3 different company...what i can say.. im not really into working world..its easily get pretty boring for me..plus i dont like d 9am-5pm time line, haha for PhD/Lecturer or research, u can come whenever u want as long u get ur work done! haha most of d times, ideas come out when im in the field playing football or when i hanging out with my frens, stressing out infront of the table wont do for me. hehe

Plus i like uni life style, however its pretty sad..coz u see every year your frens graduating and u still at uni with ppl much younger than u..can call him adik already. (im not that old, 23 only =P ). However good side is, u can see many fresh and hot chicks every year, horray! hehe

This post has been edited by spikyz: Jun 6 2010, 08:08 PM

Depending on what field you wanna go in...PhD in economics would render you overqualified for most of the jobs available whereas PhD in chemistry or biology is essential so that you could work in a certain position..
Pick-up chicks? Other PhD chicks maybe...but normal chicks in society...rarely..lol

Sorry for the typo. Yeap, Monash Uni.

VMSmith may i know much about your field of study?

Depends lolz, overqualified staff sometimes is super cool =) btw i think PhD is cool, coz u can build your own consultant company, where u can be d boss and do what u want, what u like in stuff u really good at =)

Autonomous mobile robots. Dealing only with the software side though. I'm coding with MATLAB as well.