I'm Heather Douglas. I'm doing a PhD with the Birmingham Centre for Rail Research in
Education which is part of the School of Electronic, Electrical and Systems Engineering, and I'm
currently looking at improving energy efficiency in railway networks.
I originally did my undergraduate here at Birmingham and I liked it so much that I stayed.
The centre that I'm at, the Birmingham Centre for Rail Research in Education is really
well respected in the railway community. Birmingham itself is receiving a lot of attention within
the railways because of High Speed 2 coming along. We won the bid for the High Speed College,
so really it's kind of an up and coming place for rail. I think Birmingham is one
of the few places that offers Masters in Railway Engineering and are just opening up undergrad
courses as well, so our group is expanding and that's kind of a big draw to come and
do it here because we have the expertise, we have the staff, the opportunities, and
the facilities to do really good work in rail.
I'm quite lucky because I am fully funded by the Engineering Physical Sciences Research
Council EPSRC. So they pay my tuition fees to the University and they also pay my stipend.
I know that for conferences there are funds available as well for you to go off if you're
presenting. I managed to go to the Intelligent Transportation Systems conference in Qingdao,
China last year and that was paid for, so it was very nice. One of the perks of doing research.
I don't have any plants for after I graduate as of yet. I'm thinking that I've got two
years left and I know, being an optimist, something will come up. I do check in with
the careers advice here. They send out emails I think fortnightly with updates on what they
consider available, and I think that that will be quite useful for when I do start looking
for a job.
I try and treat being a research student as a job, so I monitor my hours and try and do
about 35 hours a week, but the good thing is that that's quite flexible. So it doesn't
have to be a standard 9 to 5. In a typical week, well I'm onto the main body of my research
having been here a year. So in a typical week most of my efforts are focused on computer
simulation modelling, but there are a lot of other things that might be going on. I
might have a meeting with my supervisor, I might have a meeting with the energy group,
I might have meetings with students. I could be doing something like this or I could be
doing what we call postgraduate teaching assistant work. We do quite a lot of outreach with colleges
and schools that come in or we can help out on the undergraduate courses. So the weeks
tend to be quite varied.
I think the facilities here are very good. For what I do, most of it's computer based,
but I have no problem provided computer has enough kind of speed and that kind of thing
for me to do what I need to do. The software's provided. Any kind of software that I would
need I can get the licences for. Another thing that's really good about Birmingham is the
access to all the online journals. As a PhD researcher you have to read and you have to
read a lot and be up to date and current, and I know I can go online and pretty much
download all the current research from whichever journals that the University subscribes to.
What I really like about being a postgrad researcher is that although I do treat it
like a job it is that flexibility and that freedom. Particularly I think at Birmingham
in my department I find it quite nice that although my project was outlined, as I've
progressed we've managed to kind of change it so every day I'm working on something that
I'm interested in and what I'm passionate about.
We're encouraged to publish as part of our PhD research. So I've currently got two papers
in for publication which hopefully I'll hear back from soon, and they like us to go
and do conferences as well. The idea is that if you can publish a conference kind of paper
in a conference then that will stand you in good stead for when you do your viva and kind
of complete your research. I haven't done a conference presentation but I have presented
research at a systems net conference and also the RRUKA Next Generation Rail conference
and won a prize for the best academic research. It was quite good to get involved in things
like that.