Off Day, Day Off

Yesterday was really an off day for me. The tiredness from the day before (cleaning the old office) really affected me. I had to rest more than usual and hence led me to less preparation for the morning lecture. On top of this, I was preparing SCL modules for the two courses I am teaching. These modules are meant to expose students to do some 'research' topics that are tangentially related to subtopics taught in the course. The students are meant to do these tasks in small groups and promote cooperation skills in research. The topics are taken from journal papers chosen suitably for advanced undergraduates. The set of papers are updated from year to year and that had me occupied the night before. When I began the lecture, I fumbled a few times until I said to myself that this lecture is awful. Thus, I stopped and deleted the recording; I told the students that I will redo this lecture at another time. I also decided not to give the other lecture that day when I'm in a groggy state. The other event that day was our weekly group QuEST meeting. We realised that this was the group meeting before the 'Eid celebration, we decided to take a group photo (see below).

Later in the evening, I had some discussions about the collaborative work that was mentioned in this post and the subsequent post. The second post had me feeling disappointed since we missed our university deadline and hence was not able to lead the collaboration. However that does not mean the other universities can't. So in the discussion, our collaborators found another university that can lead instead and we will have a meeting together on the next day (today). So to prepare for this meeting, I went on to do some fact finding tasks. This leads me to another bad news that the agency we had intended to do developmental work on quantum technology for, has changed directions and will not consider the previously planned work. That was a big setback that even involved a foreign partner. If not for the promise to meet the collaborators the next day, I would probably have given up trying to get quantum technologies to the university.

Today it is my day off but yet I have two meetings; one with the collaborators and the other with my PhD student. So in the meeting with the collaborators (two from each university and there were three universities: UTM, UniMaP and UPM), I mention the news I had learned the night before to our collaborators. Nevertheless, we decide to pursue the collaboration regardless. The hope is that this collaboration will get noticed and will help set quantum science & technology as part of national science agenda. We are actually left behind with respect to this national quantum initiatives compared to Thailand and Indonesia (see links in this post). Here is a picture of our meeting.

By the time for my next meeting with my student, I asked him to shorten it since I was feeling rather exhausted. The discussion was mostly limited to his future research direction after his submission of the final form of his thesis.