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Education

I received my Master of Science in Hydrodynamics in 2019. I studied at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). I studied at the Faculty of Marine Technology. I mainly studied computational numerical mathematics, most of which was in a field called Computational Fluid Dynamics. I loved this field partly because I loved working on technical problems and because it was so hard. I remember being astonished when going into a master's degree in engineering and thinking about all of the fantastic tools and complicated mathematical tricks I would learn and then using empirical formulas based on some experiments 40 years ago.

Being a Student

Being a student was a weird experience for me at first. Firstly, it was weird being one of the older persons at my level (I had been out of school for two years beforehand). Secondly, I had to learn how to become a good student rather than just focusing on learning my subjects.

Exams​

Exams can be tricky. Some people get nervous, some get agitated. I for one, never really understood my stress level until after the fact. One of the weird things was how difficult it was to get out of exam mode, and back into vacation mode. This usually took a couple of days to just get in a relaxed mood.

Exams measure what is on the exam, not what you know. This is important to comprehend, what they measure is what the examiners think is important, but also other things. You might get a bad grade, based on the mood of the reviewers, they might have a bad day, have argued with their spouse, or others. Therefore, make no mistake: The key to good grades is to understand and know what is on the exam and know what is a good answer. That is all you need to know for good grades. If you want to actually learn, you might also succeed in getting good grades, but those two things are not the same.

Master thesis

I wrote my master's thesis on simulating fluid flow directly; it was pretty complicated. I loved working on the master's thesis, primarily working on the code and simulation.
The link to my master's thesis can be found here: Thesis

Process​

I think it might be helpful to mention my process. Education is a journey, and I would love to share as much of the journey and the knowledge I gained from being at the university.

Pre-Project​

Doing the pre-project for my master's thesis was one of the most hectic and challenging times in my educational and work life. One of the issues was that there was a huge load on the other courses I took that semester, which led to some problems for me as I got overwhelmed. Many job opportunities also came in the way, and I struggled a bit to work on everything together. Furthermore, my pre-project required me to learn quite difficult simulation tools and understand the tool and supercomputing, as well as working on SSH and Python. This is also where I had my first encounter with VIM. As is customary, it ended with me turning my computer off. I think I almost collapsed right before the end of the project, when progress was slow as heck and I did not get any wins at all. It was quite the difficult task.

Master Thesis Process​

My master's thesis process was quite a different experience from the pre-project. I attribute the ease of writing and working on this to the following reasons.

  • Experience
  • Routines
  • Systematic approach. One great starting point was that during the pre-project phase, I had gotten a lot of experience using the tools at my disposal and became much more accomplished at using them. I felt like my work had become "easier" and that I had a lot of good experience in setting up and working diligently. In my six months, focusing almost entirely on the master thesis, not being distracted, and being thorough in the work helped immensely. My progress was incrementally improving, and having a head start without significant breaks also helped. The last reason was my ability to split the work into separate parts. In my master's, I analyzed many different angles and did a "full" run for each angle. This helped a lot, as I had a lot of repetitions, which made each run more efficient and quicker.

Delivery​

The last part of the master thesis for me was just finishing up the report and investigating the results. As I did a lot of greenfield research, it was difficult for me to exactly understand what was happening, so I spent a lot of time explain how it was happening. I dont really know how useful the master thesis was. In hindsight, I would have loved to travel or focusing on other aspects of student life a bit more.

Reflections

I think studing a hard and difficult subject is very rewarding. I felt like my work made me able to not only become very good at my subject, but also made it quite easy for me to quickly grasp difficult concepts.

In my work, I felt primarily that I lacked a lot of computer science skills, and that has affected a lot of my work as a data scientist.

Links

Thoughts

  • There are two types of master students: those who arrive before 10 AM and those who ask for an extension of time.
  • After about four years of studying, I felt capable and ready for the workforce, the last year was just icing on the cake for me.
  • Before starting on a subject, go through a couple of exams and understand what they are asking about.
  • I wish I had taken as many notes during my studies as I do now, it would have been awesome to have my knowledge in the garden from my studies.
  • I used a lot of LateX in my studies. Never used it much outside of that.