SENSE e-Network is online now!

The SENSE website has now two new useful facilities: an interactive PhD forum and a knowledge database. This e-network gives you the opportunity to reach all PhD students within the SENSE network, in all disciplines and all over the world.

Interdisciplinary

The project to build an e-network for SENSE was born during our SENSE A1 course last summer. The idea came up when we noticed that our research school is very diverse and interdisciplinary. This gives great opportunities, as interaction with people from outside our field can give new understanding or inspiration for tackling our research problems, at least in theory. However, we got the impression that this kind of cross-pollination is very rare, because we either do not understand what other students are doing or because we are simply not aware of it.

Overcoming this "tower of Babel" is more important than ever. Today, we as scientists are expected to be aware of the latest developments in fields not directly related to ours and be able to use a whole array of techniques and methods. Our aim is to create an interactive knowledge database, in which all of us are the beneficiaries and the providers at the same time.

Knowledge database

First of all, we have added a way the users are clustered. Every user can now select in his/her profile very specific research themes (e.g. wetland ecology or civil engineering), research methods (e.g. game theory or GIS) and research tools (e.g. Fortran or R). This helps you to identify students that may run into similar problems as you do, or researchers that have special knowledge that may help you out.

PhD forum

Second, we have set up a forum, in which you can post and answer questions. You can go there for very specific problems, such as a particular algorithm, but also for very broad ones. If you are wondering, for instance, what is a good book on regression analysis, or whether a course on scientific writing is worth following, posting the question in the forum will probably give you better answers than asking a random colleague.

This e-network is by no means static. There is plenty of room for improvements and suggestions. We are all part of the SENSE Research School. Let us try to get as much as possible out of it!
> See our FAQ on the e-Network

Andries Richter,
Petra Stolk,
Richard Oyoo,
Thu Phan Minh and

Wieteke Willemen