Student Seminar December 2022 — My First Presentation as a PhD Student

The student seminar in December 2022 was the third student seminar I attended overall, and the first as a PhD student.

Like first-year Master’s students, first-year PhD students generally aren’t expected to have many concrete results yet — they’re still considered to be adapting, especially if they didn’t do their Master’s at University of Tsukuba.

A Bit of a Head Start

My situation was a little different. Since I’d already done my Master’s and research in the same lab, I had a kind of “privilege” compared to new students starting completely from scratch in April 2022. Because of that, I felt an extra sense of responsibility — at least to show that those two years of prior experience gave me some edge.

That said, my PhD research topic had nothing to do with my Master’s research. So I still had to start over — just not entirely from zero. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I started from 10 out of 100, not 0.

Writing My First First-Author Paper

This might sound like an excuse, but through early 2022 I spent a lot of time writing my first paper as first author. It was a long process — drafting, running additional experiments to strengthen the arguments, then running simulations to prove the experimental results matched both numerical and analytical models.

A Breakthrough in the Final Days

As the seminar approached, I got lucky — a “breakthrough” showed up in the last few days before presenting. I found a new method for measuring thermal conductivity and thermo-optic coefficient (how refractive index changes with temperature) simultaneously, by heating a transparent substrate with a laser.

The method was genuinely interesting, with strong potential for future research — but to keep this page light, I’ll save the technical details for a dedicated research write-up.