31 December, 2020
By Ali Trueworthy
Its around 10am when the sun peeks up from the horizon in Fairbanks, Alaska. I am on a call with Emily Browning from UAF and Curtis Rusch from UW. We are looking back on 2020 at each of our universities. Emily picks up her laptop to give us a glimpse of the late morning dawn. It is light enough to see the area outside of her window, blanketed in snow. I am missing the snow this holiday season. Having stayed in the Willamette Valley of Oregon instead of making my usual trip back to New Hampshire to see my family, much of the snow I have seen so far this winter has been through a webcam. But I am happy to share Emily's view, even mediated by our laptops. The calm Alaskan town outside of her window is one place I would never have seen were it not for the new-normal of the Zoom meeting. Emily, a fellow PhD student in PMEC, points out how much more she has been able to connect with students from UW and OSU since many of us have started working remotely. And she has a good point. When it comes to guest lectures, presentations, and defenses, PMEC students and faculty from all three universities have come together more often than usual this year. I got to watch Curty's preliminary exam this summer, and he attended both my practice for my qualifying exam and my Master's defense. Curty is planning to finish his PhD in 2021, as are several other students he works with, and he expects that those defenses will be online too. It's an odd way to close out years and years of work, but, we both shrug, their isn't much we can do about it.
Just as the defenses have carried on, so has a lot of the testing at PMEC. This summer, Emily got to test a tidal turbine she has been working with that I shared an article about here. Her colleagues put together some video footage of the tests, which you can watch below. Curty tells me that there is a lot of testing on the horizon at UW of both wave and tidal technologies. An underwater vehicle wave energy project and a wind-wave project are staged to enter the wave basin at OSU.
Many PMEC students and faculty published papers from their home office in 2020, which can be found on the publication page. It has been a perfect time for the often-already isolating practice of scientific paper writing. To ward off some of those feelings of isolation, Curty and his labmates have writing accountability groups in which they make audio or video call appointments to check in on each others’ progress. They tried some other ways of supplementing their workdays with virtual social interactions, which, as many of us can understand, don't quite match the joy of a computer-free grad student lunch hour. Students at UW used gather.town, a virtual "office" environment with avatars that allow you to "walk" around the office and engage in 1-on-1 conversations. Here at Oregon State, we kept as Tuesday lunch tradition alive through the summer thanks to some stellar student leaders.
This year at PMEC, when working to maintain connections, we certainly had successes and failures. But one thing that I am happy about is that we were also able to forge new connections, especially across universities. This year's first virtual all-center meeting was a success, and I am personally looking forward to working with people I met for the first time there. With teams participating in the Marine Energy Collegiate Competition from both OSU and UW, graduate students from PMEC at both universities have introduced several undergrads to our community.
They might have looked a bit different, but this year at PMEC brought defenses, testing, publications, meetings, and, of course, a lot of at-home coding! I forgot to ask Emily, but I am guessing that when the pandemic began, the view from her window was similar to what it is now, snow-covered and cold, marking nearly a year. Our conversation circled back to snow, the ski trips or mountain climbs we each had in mind for the winter. When it melts, after the Alaskan 10am sunrise turns to a 10pm sunset and another academic year comes to a close, we have one tentative plan in common. Curty, Emily, and I (as well as many others at PMEC) all submitted abstracts for the 2021 European Wave and Tidal Energy Conference. In a perfect world, we will see each other there in Plymouth, UK this September. Crossing our fingers, we bid farewell, Happy Adventuring and Happy New Year.