iMechanica - CALLING ALL STUDENTS! (and everyone else) - Comments

Re: Thoughts on iMechanica, Students and Leaders

Biswajit Banerjee — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:14:58 -0400

Hi Dhruv and others,

I've been waiting eagerly to see the first instalment of the classical paper discussion group that had been proposed. What's the latest status on that? Please get the discussion started as soon as possible.

On a lighter note, for those of you who are or have been foreign students in the US, here's a clip from PhDComics.

-- Biswajit

Thoughts on iMechanica, Students and Leaders

Dhruv Bhate — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:36:55 -0400

Michael,

We proposed some of these ideas almost a year ago - at the time, crystallized with the benefit of hindsight, there was one key argument in my mind: Folks who are students now, will tomorrow be Professors, industry members etc. and potentially represent iMechanica's future contributors. Therefore, if we want to increase the impact and progress of iMechanica, we need to bring in more students and excite them about iMechanica.

Making a separate page for Students was just one of the ideas towards that goal. We believed that such a page would make it more likely for students to post their ideas, start threads, and develop it independently. Who is to say that the creation of a new page for Students is "not organic"? After all, we came up with the idea ourselves quite naturally (which is perhaps why we still don't have a page for students, but that is another story) :-)

I also disagree with your comment on the entries in the Education section being inappropriate. Most of them are very relevant and best fit in the Education section. For now, I believe this remains the best page for students to post their ideas to.

However, many questions do go unanswered in the "Ask iMechanica" section. Many papers are posted with no comments received in return. I believe we still do not have the numbers. I would like to believe that if we have more visitors to iMechanica than we do now (say 100x the present number), this would not be the case. Students are a great group to attract and arguably easier to get involved than most professionals.

Also, I do not believe a separate page for students will necessarily translate into more student activity - and I agree with you there, and am contradicting something I said previously on this thread. This very thread garnered 20 odd posts and there are perhaps a thousand or more students registered. In my humble opinion, and this may sound flippant, we need to increase our student membership by one or two orders of magnitude to have enough participation to justify a student page. And for this we need several students to take the lead, an area where I myself have not done as well as I had planned.

I think Prof. Suo's idea of a Journal Club for students is a good starting point and is easier to get going than say, marhsalling students across universities to promote iMechanica. I will try and set this up in the coming days, but anyone reading this, please feel free to take the lead.

Finally, on a slightly philosiphical note, we are all students. I just graduated and joined the industry, but I certainly don't feel any smarter! I think iMechanica and the people who post here, must realize that a significant percentage of their audience is a "student" when it comes to their research. This means every poster must make the extra effort to address this "student" base. Taken in this spirit, we would not have to distinguish "student" from "non-student".

I hope my ramblings are useful. To summarize my thoughts:
We don't need a "Students" page. We need everyone to recognize that a lot of us are students. And we need more people, students above all, if only due to the fact that they represent the future. And finally, like all endeavours great and small, we need passionate leaders. Why don't you take it on? Who knows, it may look good on your Resume too.

Regards,
Dhruv

Comment, as requested

Mike Graham — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:29:46 -0400

I am commenting because you requested that students who read this comment.

As to the topic at hand, I don't think much action is required. I do not think that the community here is going to make any large shifts because of a special effort to attract us students. I do not think that a section called Students would be very effective. It is of note that the similar section you mentioned—Education—has many entries that do not seem to have anything to do with education.

Forgive my cyncicism, but I am sharing what I think is most realistic. I don't think iMechanica needs to change to suit students; it has currently formed into what it is naturally and organically, and it doesn't make sense to change it to try to suit such a goal. Publicity among students is another issue, but I do not think it makes sense to try to make this a different place to attract people who otherwise would not be interested.

Answer iMechanica

Zhigang Suo — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 03:01:26 -0500

At the top of the right side of iMechanica is a tab called Ask iMechanica. Here people can post and answer questions. Apparently a large number of questions remain unanswered. If you are in the mood, please try to answer a question or two. As we all know, the best way to learn a subject is to teach it.

Let's use the education section

Dhruv Bhate — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:30:49 -0500

Hello all,

I started this thread, and feel guilty for not taking it to its logical conclusion: a special sub-section for students. For a while, we did have a "For Students" link, that would show up all the posts with "students" as a key word. Now, I suggest, if you're still reading this thread and wondering what happened, that we use the "Education" link for all that we intended to use in the "students" section we envisioned. This is already being done, so there is nothing new. I just wanted to put some closure on a discussion that began with much fervor.

Dhruv

hi all

prashant sharma — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:24:14 -0400

thanks for making so much effort for student and working professional to get there problem solved so quickly...

Dear Kejie, welcome

Mahdi Kazemzadeh — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 07:03:27 -0400

Dear Kejie,

You are very welcome. We all have the same sort of ideas here; if you refer to quick guide section on top corner of the iMechanicas webpage, you will find a catagory named "For Students". Please feel free to post any comment or your project issues and share it with the other students there. Looking forward to hear from you there.

Mahdi Kazemzadeh

Volunteer!

Kejie Zhao — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:56:37 -0400

Hi, Dhruv and Mahdi

I'm a new people in imechanica, and totally agree with your thoughts on buiding a student space. It's a good method to publicize imechanica among students, more important, it will benifit largely student-self. Actually, from the begining of the research work I have received many patient replies from others, even my questions seem stupid. They are really helpful. Now it's a good chance to feedback.

As student's experience is big limited, I think the space can focus on the basic concepts of solid mechanics, and provide links of experts in the sub-field, also questions encountered in their work should be encouraged to be posted. Although it may need long time to build complete sub forums for students, the suggestion and encouragement are also precious. On my responsibility, I can take best to publicize imechanica in Xi'an Jiaoda, and try to answer the questions related to computation simulation method, and some knowledge on nanoporous materlas. You may contact with me by kejie@mail.xjtu.edu.cn. Thanks!

iMechanica Poster

Dhruv Bhate — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:25:07 -0400

I have started a new thread in the "opinion" section and created a poster to help publicize iMechanica in schools. Please visit this page and share your thoughts.
Thanks!

Thanks

Dhruv Bhate — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 22:04:06 -0400

Hi Sandip,

I am glad you found them useful. I had made this for a presentation - that is one of the ways we can share information here. We all survey the literature in our field of interest and often document it in some form - such files can be shared on iMechanica.

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it and am glad it was of some use to you.

Dhruv

Hi Dhruv, The notes

Sandip Haldar — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 03:16:27 -0400

Hi Dhruv,

The notes provided in your webpage are very good. I read the first one and was really helpful to get the time history of the fracture mechanics.

Thanks,

Sandip Haldar

RE: Overview of solid mechanics

Dhruv Bhate — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:21:50 -0400

Shivnandan,

Thanks for going through my CZM review...I think you make a very good point. There is the "very basic" material, from statics to LEFM, that can be found in undergraduate/graduate texts. On the other hand, some of the subjects being discussed in the J-Club, e.g. "Mechanics of Hydrogels", maybe a little too specific for the student population. The in-between is where I think we can learn the most: topics such as Cohesive Zone Modeling or X-FEM - subjects that are not taught in a typical graduate course, yet are not too specific or applied. If this makes sense, we can identify some areas and assign Editors for these topics.

SIMULTANEOUSLY, I think it is critical that we increase student activity at iMechanica and do our best to publicize it within our individual schools - but I will bring this up in a seperate post.

Thanks for your thoughts, looking forward to more discussion with you.

Dhruv

RE: A place for students

Dhruv Bhate — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:45:30 -0400

Prof. Suo,

Thanks a lot for your guidance: I think this is an excellent starting point for us and a wonderful idea. This IS the best way to get things started: we can continue to post in Education, but include as a tag the word "students". Later on, we may feel that we should have a seperate section.

Your suggestion about the student journal club is an excellent one, we will follow up on that.

Now that we have a way of collecting our posts together, let us focus on the next step: increasing student activity.

Dhruv

A place for students

Zhigang Suo — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 23:38:32 -0400

This thread of discussion has shown considerable interest in starting a place for students in iMechanica. To this end, let us first experiment with a few simple ideas:

A link is added on the right side of iMechanica called "For students". Please comment if you think any other title for this link is more effective.
This link gives all posts with the free tag "students".
Please use this tag when you post anything of particular interest to students.
Moderators can also add this tag to existing posts.
Please subscribe to RSS feeds of the posts and comments.

Sutdent-run journal clubs?

Zhigang Suo — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:38:25 -0400

A student-run jClub sounds like an excellent idea! The mission of this new jClub can be quite different from the mission of the existing jClub. If any of your colleagues are interested in this idea, you might want to take a look at the oerating notes of the jClub, and post comments here to formulate the ideas. Michelle Oyen posted a few related ideas before:

Questions in my mind are

What might be the mission of such a journal club? Why bother?
Should we begin with a journal club on a sub-area of mechanics, and see how it might work? If so, which sub-area should we try first?
How can students divide the work among themselves? That is, what might be the operating procedures?

It took people like Pradeep, Michelle and many others much discussion to get the jClub off the ground. To make a student-run jClub a success will also take some careful planning. Your thoughts on this will be helpful.

CALLING ALL STUDENTS! (and everyone else)

Dhruv Bhate — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:37:32 -0400

Recently, Prof. Suo and several of us students have been discussing the possibility of increasing student presence and activity on iMechanica . With this in mind, two of us: Mahdi Kazemzadeh and I, have identified three important issues we would like to get your thoughts on. Please comment and let us know what you think, even if you are not a student. Also, if you wish to add any more issues you think we should look at, please post your thoughts in this regard as well.

1. Suggestions for ways in which students can best make use of iMechanica and contribute to its growth and sustenance: In other words, how best can iMechanica and the student community benefit each other?

2. This is a tricky one: should we request iMechanica architects for a dedicated section called "Students"? What would such a section contain and how would it distinguish itself from other sections, esp. the one titled "Education "? Would it make more sense to just use the "Education" section for discussion?

3. Student Volunteers: This is perhaps the most important to sustain student activity for a
long time to come. We need students to step up and accept responsibility in at least two of these areas:
a. Publicizing iMechanica among students (and faculty): This could involve posting flyers on technical notice boards and/or sending emails to fellow graduate students or department lists.
b. Taking responsibility for answering student questions or directing them to experts/books: This is critical. Nobody likes to post a question/comment and not get a response from anyone. I think it is vital that several of us students accept the responsibility of checking the recent posts regularly and making an effort to answer any questions we can or direct the author of the post to an expert or a source that can be of help. If we interact with each other, we can make iMechanica a more friendly and useful place for everyone.

If you are interested and willing to be a volunteer for either or both of the above, please post below and say so and we will get in touch with you. Finally, will it help to identify a seperate group of students as "Student Moderators", just the way iMechanica has architects, moderators and managers?

While most of these three issues relate to goals that are somewhat long-term, there are a few things you can do immediately:

Register, if you haven't already
Edit the Job Description in your Profile to "Student" - this way we can keep track of the progress we are making
Comment on this thread, even if it is just one line, to let us know of your presence and support
Follow and participate in the evolution of this thread: keep checking back for new posts and new ideas!

These ideas are open to change. Our hope is that we can together define these goals and the ways we can best address them, and then propose them to the iMechanica architects for approval. It is very likely that iMechanica will become the central point of communication for all
mechanicians in the future. What better place to participate in something grand while getting visibility and making new connections?

Looking forward to hearing from you,
Dhruv and Mahdi