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11 May 2020, 03:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: Four ways of using CORD you may not know about |
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You are hopefully already aware of the need to store your research data in CORD, Cranfield’s research data repository, but did you know that it can be used to manage other content as well? Archives You may have archived research available on internal servers that would benefit from being made publicly available. Archived content can be harvested into CORD using an API or you can contact researchdata@cranfield.ac.uk for help. There is a great example of how Monash University migrated content, including theses, into its repository. Conference materials If you are hosting a conference, you may want to create a subgroup to publish its outputs. These can be presentations, posters, conference proceedings, recordings from the event, and more. If you have attendees from outside Cranfield University, you can configure a non-logged in submission workflow to accept submissions from external users. We have successfully done this ourselves when promoting the Defence and Security Doctoral Symposium (DSDS) at Shrivenham, and there are other good examples from the Technology for Independence conference and the University of Cape Town Open Data Day. Portfolios Whether it’s to display the outputs from a particular project or to enable assessment, collections can be used to group portfolios together. Some also include the documentation for assessment. Look at these three mini case studies showcasing research portfolios. Private collaboration CORD may also be a suitable platform for group projects involving multiple institutions. You can invite people from outside Cranfield University to a private project to collaborate and share data privately. If and when the project is ready to be shared more widely, you can make it publicly available. Top tip! There is new documentation on how to use an API to upload content to CORD using an existing DOI (permanent link) rather than creating a new one. Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash |
12 May 2020, 02:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: My Virtual Group Project Experience |
The group project is an important part of my postgraduate degree here at Cranfield University.  Field trip to visit the client at the beginning of March I am studying for an MSc in Environmental Water Management and I have had the opportunity to work in a team with students from different MSc courses in Environment and Agrifood. In the team, I was joined by a fellow colleague from the same course with 4 others from 2 different courses (Future Food Sustainability and Environmental Management for Business). For our project, we worked on Water Risks in Horticulture for our client. This was a new opportunity for me as I have not had previous experience working for a horticultural business in the past. But it gave me the chance to work with diverse people and develop myself. I have been fortunate enough to find myself in several groups and teams in the past, so teamwork has been a skill I have developed over the years. This experience was different as I was going to be working with different people from a diverse range of ethnic groups and different courses. I have successfully worked and communicated effectively in a team in the past, so I was confident this will turn out excellent right from the start.  Field trip to visit the client at the beginning of March Our group project aimed at analysing water risks and developing measures to mitigate them in the context of the water management systems put in place by our client. We were to propose different water strategies based on our findings and available technologies, the most efficient management and technological solutions to monitor water use, recognise water risks, and implement schemes for water supply enhancement and water demand management. Site visits were organised by our client and we were able to visit one of the sites before the lockdown was initiated in the UK. All other meetings were held online on Skype and the collection of data was through email.  Field trip to visit the client at the beginning of March We organised weekly meetings and we met at least twice a week to discuss the best possible way to complete the group project successfully. I was nervous whenever I meet new people, and my spoken communication is not at its best position and efficiency at the beginning of the project. Also, I had to work tight schedules and attend to several tasks assigned to me within a short period of time, of which I had to do. I had to multi-task a lot and manage my time in an effective way. I had wonderful group members, who were supportive, hard workers, reliable and result-driven, and most importantly fun to work with! We worked well together and shared tasks accordingly from different locations across the world. Despite the current global situation, we stood strong to ensure we successfully completed the group project. After weeks of hard work, writing reports, and preparing for our presentation, we had a wonderful session to defend our group project in style as we got positive feedback from our audience and supervisor. The group project has enhanced my skills in teamwork, time management, written, and verbal communication. My confidence and leadership skills within the group have also improved, as during group meetings and with several tasks I was able to take on the role of leader on some tasks and rise to this challenge. Over the time we were doing the group project I felt less nervous during presentations and virtual meetings and, I was not only able to complete all the tasks allocated to me, but I was also able to assist others in their tasks, and I was also able to do some online LinkedIn courses that are of great importance and value to the group project and to my personal development. |
12 May 2020, 03:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: About my life at Cranfield University! |
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From the moment I arrived at Cranfield for an open day back in November 2018, I immediately felt that coming to this University would have a positive influence on my career, and my decision to apply for a place at Cranfield was made that very day. Walking into the Vincent building and being greeted by very friendly members of staff also encouraged my decision. At the open day, from the moment I walked in, to the moment I left it was apparent that this was more than just a University. The day consisted of a talk on the topic I was looking at studying (Renewable Energy) and a tour of the campus, including the Anaerobic Digestion plant and the Cranfield Student Association (arguably the more important part of the tour). By the end of this tour, I made it my priority to apply for a place of study on the next intake (2019-2020). Fast forward 11 months, Cranfield would become my place of study. Since October 2019, through various assignments including Energy Economics and Policy, where we studied the economics of energy and renewable energy technology, where we covered different renewable energy generating sources, our lecture content was put to test. It has been a journey of constant development which has opened my mind to different aspects of the energy sector.  January 2020 The second half of the course consisted of three applied modules, lasting two weeks each. Week one focused on lecture content followed by applying knowledge obtained in those lectures in the form of a presentation at the end of week two. This was the half in which students were able to demonstrate their group working skills. The order in which the modules ran really helped prepare for the third phase of the course, group project. This is the phase which is currently taking place and it is exciting to say the least. Students work in groups of mixed discipline, predominantly focusing on renewable technology or renewable related projects. Most projects are also funded by a company who are looking to implement the findings. This is a great way of making sure students put their best efforts into the project. The remaining phase of my Cranfield journey is the Individual Project phase. I am very much interested in grids of the future, microgrids and looking at how artificial intelligence (AI) can support the transition from a fossil fuel bias grid to a more renewable and sustainable, greener grid.  January 2020 |
13 May 2020, 04:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: My three MSc highlights – life before and after COVID-19 lockdown. |
My Cranfield journey continues to surprise me daily with crests and troughs of adventure. A day before my original date of flying from New Delhi, India, I was hospitalized after being diagnosed with dengue. It was one of the toughest times of my life as my peers had started their journey at Cranfield while I was back in India trying to recover. The support and understanding that I received from the university and the faculty in this time of personal crisis made me realize that I am aspiring to be at the right place. And so I began my journey studying an MSc in Engineering and Management of Manufacturing Systems at Cranfield University.  When I finally arrived at Cranfield, I was greeted with a warm hug and additional support to study and cope up with the modules I had missed. My curriculum demanded serious academic rigor for the first four months, however, I was not alone in this journey. I spent the next four months studying in the library with some exceptionally talented young students who are now friends for life. This was my first experience of studying with people from different countries, with cultural backgrounds ranging from China and Thailand to France. While it sounds all work and no play, this was not the case. Every Friday, we would cook a different cuisine and celebrate one more week of hard work. This is the first highlight of my master’s.  February 2020 marked the end of an era of assignments and exams. With some excellent academic scores, myself and six other students moved to Swindon to work on our group project with Becton Dickinson Company. We all came from different fields of study besides cultural diversity. From finding an apartment for ourselves to travelling together, to playing Laser Tag and Escape Rooms, our team bonding was on point from the beginning of the project. For over two weeks, we spent eight hours every day working hard at the BD, Swindon office, and then spending time together in the evening. We were having multiple stakeholder meetings and gemba walks daily when the COVID-19 stepped into our lives, changing the course of things overnight. Our project scope changed and we were clouded by a dilemma. I remember we called an emergency meeting and made the difficult decision of going back to our home countries before the borders closed to continue the project from there. This decision was immediately understood and approved by both our academic and industrial supervisors. The support of the university increased ten folds from that day on and continues to date. We worked virtually in four different time zones, curated over 50 virtual brainstorming sessions with respective stakeholders, stretched our limits and delivered everything expected from us regardless of the situation around. Our time together as a team navigating the project in a pandemic made another set of friends. This was the second highlight of my master’s.  While this whole experience sounds very overwhelming already, there are many things that I miss doing with my Cranfield Community. I miss Friday evenings at Student Think Tank preparatory meetings that brought together the best of the manufacturing students from eight different countries to talk about local innovation in our countries. We always went back to our hostels, feeling pumped from learning something new and pizza treats by our professors. I could not be more excited for my thesis on feasibility Study of Digital Supply Chain Control Towers because my time at Cranfield firmed up my interest in pursuing a career in Supply Chain. This was the third highlight of my master’s. Currently, this is not an ideal situation for any international student, but I am glad I chose Cranfield Community. I am reminded daily by my professors and peers that this was not the sad ending to our journey, but rather an interesting survival of the fittest story which we will talk about our entire lives.  I am looking forward to meeting my friends and professors again at graduation, which will be sometime in the future when all this melodrama of the world would have hopefully passed. |
13 May 2020, 06:02
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: Free online courses from IEEE |
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Can we interest you in some free stuff?! Those great people at IEEE have offered Cranfield staff and students free access to a whole host of short online courses from now until the end of June. What’s on offer? Over 500 online courses on topics as diverse as:
I’m in! How can I access them?
Enjoy! But remember, this special offer is for a limited time only… If you have any queries or comments, please contact your library staff – Kings Norton Library, Management Information and Resource Centre (MIRC), or Barrington Library. |
19 May 2020, 05:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: Meet Mendeley: a powerful referencing tool that does the hard work for you! |
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Are you looking for a way to manage your references and to create reference lists for your assignments or thesis? If so, you may wish to consider using Mendeley. What is it? Mendeley is a free reference manager which also offers links to an academic social network and a library of resources. It can be accessed anywhere in the world and has online, desktop and mobile versions. How can it help me? Mendeley will help you to:
Specific features of the free Mendeley service which make it popular among academics are:
Ready to get started? Create an account Want to learn more? Check out your Library’s guide on using Mendeley: Image by Mariann Szőke from Pixabay |
21 May 2020, 02:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: Working on my Group Project at home |
I distinctly remember the first day I started the group project, it was also the first meeting with our supervisors and industry client. I remember it so clearly as it was snowing! With the crazy weather outside, we entered the building for our meeting leaving the completely white campus behind us. Once we had finished, the sun was shining as if it hadn’t snowed at all. Either the weather had changed dramatically, or the meeting was really long, we are still unsure!  My snow-covered garden on the first day of the group project! The Group Project has been an intense two-month period in which I have learnt a lot, as well as having to adapt in this extraordinary situation, as many people around the world are also experiencing. Both at an academic and personal level, the last two months have been very “singular”. Understanding how to manage the situation in a way in which it will positively affect me physically or psychologically. We have had to start working in a different way than was original planned. I would say that even though we have had to make numerous changes, we have not let this stop us completely our main goal of presenting our group project report. At the start of the project I was excited as I knew that I was going to work with new people from different MSc courses. I was looking forward to learning from them, as we all came from different backgrounds, courses and had different ways of working. In fact, I remember including this as one of the goals on my application form to study at Cranfield University so it had been something I have been looking forward to. Through my group project experience, I have not only learnt how to deal with different personalities but also how to make sure that everyone has the chance to contribute and in doing this we came up with some interesting ideas! I also learnt that sometimes teamwork could be successful and is a skill that can always be improved. I have also been able to improve my leadership and problem-solving skills as well as my verbal communication and this is the skill I feel I have been able to develop the most. Throughout these two months, I have also been able to complete some interviews and I have found this useful as it has put into practice my ability to handle a real interview situation. I also took some online courses and workshops on LinkedIn Learning and I strongly believe that these were helpful and I was able to contribute to the development of my skills as well. My experience on the group project, on my personal development has led me to enhance and develop my professional career, and now I feel more prepared for the next stage of the course which is the individual thesis! Covid-19 has led us to change some of the ways in which we worked towards our Group Project as we had to adapt in order to complete the end of project report successfully. We were lucky to have the three meetings face-to-face, so we know each other in person before we started to work remotely. On 18th of April, we had our first online meeting via WebEx and from this point all the meetings and contact were virtual.  One of the first meetings face-to-face In my humble opinion, I would say that working remotely has had its ups and downs! I am a person who likes to talk and communicate with others, showing them what I am doing and I want my teammates to show me what are they doing, deciding solutions together as I think it is more efficient. With this in mind, working remotely has really surprised me! By working through a screen, we were able to take advantage of more hours in the day as we no longer had to factor in commuting times onto campus. This has meant that we were able to be more concise and going straight to the point. At the beginning we were unsure how we would find working like this but it ended up being a good option, well… the only one, but in the end we were happy!. At the moment I’m living in Cranfield village – I’m not planning to travel back to Spain any time soon – and I have to say that I can’t complain a lot when it comes to working from home. Most of the days have been sunny and I have taken advantage of that by working in my garden!  Working from home in the garden – not so bad! My experience working with a real industry client has been positive as well. The group project I was working on was “Future Innovations in the Agricultural and Environmental Engineering in the UK”. It was sponsored by The Douglas Bomford Trust which is a charity registered in 1972, who aim to support the development of young engineers and invest in research in the field of agricultural engineering and mechanisation. The trust was lovely to work with as they were helpful and encouraging us in the same way that our supervisors did. I’m glad that I was in this group for the project as I have learnt new concepts and methods of how to work, as well as the topic, was really interesting and new for me, as I focus more on food technology. It is true that sometimes it doesn’t come out perfect first time, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from it. Seeing my group, work as a team to face and solve obstacles together, I feel is the essence of working in a group. I feel proud that I have achieved what I set out to do at this stage. The conclusion I will take away from this experience is, that no matter what happens, you can always do what you set out to achieve. And now, as I said before, I feel eager and prepared for the next phase which is starting… the individual thesis! Wish me luck!! |
22 May 2020, 05:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: Using the Mendeley citation plugin with Word |
Before you start using Mendeley with Microsoft Word you need to have installed the Word plugin. Instructions are available here. If you have successfully installed the Plugin, Windows users will find the Citation plugin menu on their Word Ribbon in the References tab, see below. Mac users, check your Add-ins tab. Within a document, whenever you wish to insert a citation, all you need to do is position your cursor at the point where the citation should be and click ‘Insert Citation’.  A dialogue box will appear where you can enter a term to search for the relevant reference.  Select the correct reference and click ‘OK’. If you are unsure, click on ‘Go To Mendeley’ to open your Dashboard and select it from there. The citation will appear in your text. Simple! If you need to edit a citation, e.g. to enter a page number for a direct quotation or to remove an author’s name when you have already mentioned them in your text, this is really easy too. Simply click on the relevant citation in your text and select ‘Edit Citation’ from the Ribbon options. You then need to click on the in-text citation to the left of the highlighted text below.  The following menu box will appear where you can make the changes you require. Click ‘OK’ to confirm.  Changes will be instantly reflected in your text. At the end of your document, once all your citations have been inserted, return to the plug-in menu and select ‘Insert Bibliography’. Your references should appear wherever your cursor was located.  Provided that you have selected Cranfield’s referencing style, i.e. Harvard-Cranfield, everything should be perfectly formatted! Any questions on Mendeley, please feel free to contact either Kings Norton Library or MIRC! |
23 May 2020, 03:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: 500th University research data item now published! |
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We have two reasons to celebrate today. Firstly, we recently uploaded the 500th record to Cranfield’s Online Research Data Repository, CORD, and secondly, the system officially launched on 23 May 2016 so it’s CORD’s fourth birthday! CORD contains the underlying research data used to support our publications, from spreadsheets to multimedia to code. It also holds other valuable non-peer-reviewed outputs such as white papers and video presentations of research. Most data is available open access, to maximise the visibility of Cranfield’s research and to benefit the wider society, but in some cases restrictions are applied (where there are ethical, legal, or commercial sensitivities). Top three statistics:
Top three accessed items:
Top three views of CORD:
Why not navigate to CORD now and discover four ways of using CORD you may not know about to support your research? Photo by Stephanie McCabe on Unsplash |
26 May 2020, 07:02
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: Make Google Scholar work even harder for you! |
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Although we recommend that you use the Library’s tools to search the academic literature in your subject area, we recognise that many of you really like to use Google Scholar too. Did you know that you can link the library’s subscriptions to your Google Scholar account, so that you see full text from Cranfield’s subscriptions in your results list? We are sure that this will help you out even further in these difficult days when the library is closed and we are all working from home, wherever that may be. To set it up, follow these steps: Go to Google Scholar and sign in. Click on the ‘hamburger menu’ at the top left of the screen and choose ‘settings’:  Click ‘library links’:  Type Cranfield in the search box and search. Once the results screen shows, check the boxes as shown below and click save:  The next time you do a search you’ll see the Cranfield links in the results list:  Why not check out your subject or course guide on your library website to find out which ones are the most appropriate for your subject area? These link to high quality library databases to help you find academic literature in your subject. |
27 May 2020, 02:01
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: You can now return your library books if you are in the UK |
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A number of students have been in touch asking how they can return their library books to us. If you are in the UK you are now able to return books to us at no cost to yourself. Firstly, please be reassured that [b]all existing loan periods have been automatically extended to the end of July[/b]. (This includes Barrington Reports loans; please ignore any overdue messages). It is no longer possible to reserve items on loan to other users, so you should not receive any recall messages. [b]For students on or close to Cranfield campus[/b] you can return your books to the desk that has been set up in the Lanchester Hall reception area (away from the reception desk). Please do not approach reception but just leave their books on the table, which will have a sign on it. [b]For students in the rest of the UK unable to get to the campus[/b], we are providing a book return service. Please parcel up the items you wish to send, weigh it, and then contact [email=library@cranfield.ac.uk]library@cranfield.ac.uk[/email] with a description of the parcel dimensions and contents. We will then send you a pre-paid postage label. The label should be affixed to the parcel, then the parcel should be dropped at the Post Office for free delivery. Proof of postage certificate should be stamped by the Post Office and a scanned copy (or photo) should be sent to us at the same email address. Please be aware that any returned books will not be removed from your account until Library staff are physically back on campus. [b]We are investigating how we might offer a similar service to international students and will publish a further update if we can do so.[/b] |
29 May 2020, 02:02
| FROM Cranfield SOM Blogs: Creating a bibliography is easy using Mendeley |
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If you’re using Mendeley’s Citation Plug-in for Word, you will soon be ready to generate a bibliography of all the references you have cited. Here we’ll run through how quick and easy it is to do this. If you haven’t yet installed the Plug-in, read our post here on how to do set it up. To insert your bibliography:
 3. Your bibliography will be created in the citation style you have chosen. If you need to change the citation style at any point, click on the ‘Style’ drop-down box in the plugin toolbar to choose from 100’s of pre-set styles available within Mendeley. Read our previous post to find out how to add the Cranfield Harvard style to Mendeley. Need to insert more citations after you’ve created your bibliography? Don’t worry. You can continue to add more citations at any time. Your bibliography will automatically update to include the new citation, and re-order itself. If you have any questions about using Mendeley, contact Kings Norton Library or MIRC. |
10 Jul 2023, 09:58
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Hi Generic [Bot],
Here are updates for you:
ANNOUNCEMENTS
 Wednesday, Apr 24, 2024 11:30am NY / 3:30pm London / 9pm Mumbai Watch earlier episodes of DI series below EP1: 6 Hardest Two-Part Analysis Questions EP2: 5 Hardest Graphical Interpretation Questions
Tuck at Dartmouth
AGSM at UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE
 GMAT Club REWARDS
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