I like watching outdoor boys' video and Luke always says that he will have fun (suffer) during his survival trips. Similarly, entering a PhD basically means that you will have some fun (suffer). You will see me having fun (suffer). I will see you having fun (suffer). Eventually and hopefully, we will finish something interesting and fun together. 

I think higher education's final goal is really not about having a happy life. In many ways, I do not think it is possible to make a fulfilling 4 years of PhD to be that happy happy. Perhaps you can also learn about Jensen Huang's comment on Happiness and Building Great Things. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2ZcBR_6mV4

General Expectations: 

• about 3 journal paper of work making up 3 chapters in the dissertation. 

• Weekly individual meeting to address your technical problems.

• Weekly group meeting where each member shows a short presentation (three slides, two slide summarize what was done, and one summarize what is the plan for next week).

• 1 to 2 funded conference presentations opportunities - ideally toward the final year so that it is aligned with graduation and job search. 

My role:

• Provide financial support. 

• Provide technical guidance and mentoring. 

• Provide other resources to support your PhD progress. 

Your role:

• Finish research tasks. 

• Maintain a good course work grade. 

• Become an independent and collaborative researcher. 

• Hopefully you will find our work fun and interesting ;) 

The more detailed general mentoring plan can be found in this folder (you will need to use MTU google account to access this internal folder):

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zv6BWW5s8fzp4oJO3u2twaSZxKFRxtdt?usp=drive_link

General Expectations: 

• Mutually agreed scope of work and hourly stipend.

• Hopefully, we will find something fun and aligns with your interest to work on.

• Typically, hourly paid research can be something like repetitive lab testing while independent study can involve more tasks like guided literature review, learning coding, and practicing simulation skills. 

• Small project group meetings at critical stage of the project.

• Can lead to co-authorship or first author publications based on results.

My role:

• Provide financial support through hourly payment. 

• Provide technical guidance and mentoring. 

Your role:

• Finish research tasks. 

• Enjoy some research life in our lab ;)

We use internal Google Drive to maintain internal resources and files. Please use the following link to access these materials. Please note that you may only access these material from internal network using your MTU account.  

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RDrZ3u3vGMi2jM0Qx-trihDPLJ2rQoyn?usp=drive_link

The general procedure of safety training is outlined in:

https://www.mtu.edu/cege/safety/training-resources/

Please talk to Yi to have the training scheduled and finish the online training session as soon as you receive them online. After that, please upload your certificate to our group's Google folder for tracking.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Sm3BUIjwyLDaF0pH0hl-T5VttkrIt6bx?usp=drive_link

Prof. Jack Baker's advice to students. BTW, if you still do not know who he is and your major is Civil Engineering, you really want to know his work.

https://www.jackwbaker.com/advice.html

Our group's prior and current work (2018-2024) can be primarily housed under the umbrella of "Origami Inspired Structures". This is still a rapidly evolving field of research, and we are seeing more and more successful commercial products using origami concepts (such as Oru Kayak).  

Here, we would like to summarize a couple nice website for learning about origami engineering:

• Robert Lang has a good list of computational tools for origami on his website:

https://langorigami.com/article/computational-origami/

• Erik Demaine has a good page summarizing the history of curve crease:

https://erikdemaine.org/curved/history/

• Ron Resch's Memorial Website. To the best of my knowledge, Ron Resch is one of the earliest researcher trying to simulate how an origami behave in a computer. He is doing this in the early 1970s, which is absolutely amazing. 

http://www.ronresch.org/ronresch/

Here, we would like to summarize a few related conferences:

• SES Annual Meeting 

• EMI Annual Meeting

• ASME IDETC-CIE Conference

• IASS Annual Symposium 

• SPIE Smart Structure

• ASME SMASIS Conference

• ASCE Earth and Space 

• APS March Meeting (Soft Matter)

I am a strong supporter of open-access in research. 

Sharing maker-space information for research. Honestly, Prof. Larry Howell is my role model. Hear about his comment on sharing maker information on research.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41886-3