Last Friday I handed in my last piece of course work at ENPC.  Despite having started my placement two weeks ago, last week I was still finishing off work for Ponts.  With all that finished (and after a refreshing weekend of skiing in the Alps), I am now able to give my project my full attention.

I have decided to use this blog to help me chart my progress through the next four months (actually it is now just three and a half!).  With my project as ill-defined as it is, I hope that entries in my blog will help me keep track of what I am achieving as well as recording the decisions that I will make along the way.

I say that the project is ill-defined but I only have one point of reference, that being the project that was the fourth year of my chemistry degree.  Back then, I was given a specific research topic and I spent the first weeks reading around the subject and planning experiments for the future.  Though that was for a chemistry degree, I think it is not an unreasonable comparison as it seems to be a similar point of departure as that for people I know doing their final year project at Imperial.

With no real point of reference, it is difficult to know what to do.  This much I do know from my supervisors at work who themselves undertook similar projects when they were at les Ponts: in the first few weeks, I will be involved in the projects that the team that I part of are working on.  The company has several tall tower projects on the go.  One possibility is that my project will be a broad survey of the different aspects of tall building design, taken from my experience of working on these different projects.  Another is that I will investigate a specific aspect of the design of one or several of these buildings and that this investigation will form the basis of my project.  It is therefore difficult to know, for example, whether the cost estimation of a skyscraper that I carried out this afternoon will be a component of my report or not.

Hence it is all the more important for me to write up what I am doing along the way.  Watch this space…