Skip to main content

3-minute summary of my PhD journey

Need to make decison towards your relationship? How about a decison tree analysis ?


Supposed you are in a long-distance relationship for some years, of course you want to be with your partner in a same city, but both of you have job in different cities, your partner shows reluctance to move to your city. What will you do? Sacrifice your job to move to another city? Is it worthy to do so? Then you need do a decision tree analysis!





If you move to another city, you need to quit your old job and find a new one, probably you can’t find a new job immediately, there may be a period that you have no income. Let’s assume you need a year to find a new job. Then the costs of moving will be the benefits of your original annual income. For your relationship, you know if you move to your partner’s city, there will be high chance of probability that both you will get married. If you don’t move, there will only be low chance of probability that you will get married. If you get married, your tax level will be lower, you share the rent and perhaps your annual income will be higher, which assume will increase 50% of annual income benefit. But there still a chance that you will not get married and you will have a very hard time due to break up. You can’t sleep well, you can’t eat well and you can’t work well, which may take you at least half a year to recover. Let’s assume the costs of break up will be the income of your half year salary. Here is the illustration of the decision tree analysis process.



Then calculation the utilities of the two decision scenarios will be :

If you move,



If you don’t move,



For example:





Then calculation results will be :



For this case, it is recommended not to move for a higher value of utility. But the results will be varied with different case background, which is highly depend on the faith or belief of you towards the relationship as well as the consequences of your decision choice.  And the assigned probability may depend on a lot factors, such as emotional factor, cultural factor, time factor, distance factor and so on. You can add these factors into account for your own model:)








Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's it like working at COWI? My four-month secondment experience

Thanks to my PhD project- INFRASTAR so that I could have the chance to spend four months in COWI  Lyngby, Denmark, for my secondment from Octorber 2018 to January 2019. COWI A/S, as an international consulting group, specialising in engineering, environmental science and economics, it attracts me a lot what's it like working here? I have been working in China, Norway and Germany, it also fascinates me to explore another different working culture in Denmark. After I finished my four-month stay, now I am very excited to share my fresh experience. The aim of this secondment is to perform case studies in the environment of the consulting company COWI under supervision of  my industry supervisor Dr. Isaac Farreras Alcover. Isaac has derived a data-based models for assessment and life prediction of monitored civil infrastructure assets on the great belt bridge during his PhD, I continued his work to quantify the conditional value of several options for monitoring campaigns to determ

What's next after a PhD? A workshop for female scientists

Since my PhD project is approaching the end soon, a lot of questions raises in my mind: what am I going to do next after a PhD? Should I stay in academia and do a post-doctor, or should I go into the industry? Can I go back to academia again if I choose to work in industry? What will the career path look like in- and outside academia? How to get all the job information?    How to improve job application skills? etc. Recently, I received an invitation from BAM to attend a workshop only for female participants - Application training for researchers: Extend your career options in- and outside academia.    Without any hesitation, I joined this workshop, and I have to say it was really a great experience with so much practical and useful information. The workshop was held by  WiN S Adlershof program in Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. WiNS stands for Women in Natural Sciences Adlershof. I was surprised to discover how well they are doing to promote the gender equality, as women are sti

Summary of my first year PhD life

It has been one year already since I started my PhD, time flies! I still remembered  the first day when  I moved to Berlin. It is just like yesterday, OMG. 12/2016 I started to work in Federal institute of material research and testing (BAM), Berlin, Germany. My supervisor gave me the first task. 1/2017 I wrote my state of art for my PhD topic under the framework of INFRASTAR project. 2/2017 I submitted an abstract for IWSHM2017 based on the task  given by my supervisor. 3/2017 INFRASTAR first training week was held in Berlin, it was the first time to meet 12 ESRs.  INFRASTAR first training week in Berlin, BAM 4/2017 I moved to Aalborg and started my secondment in Aalborg university and worked on my paper.   Secondment in Aalborg University 5/2017  With the help of teams of John in Aalborg university, I wrote the full manuscript here for IWSHM2017. 6/2017 I was back to Berlin and attended outreach activity PhD retreat in warren which