Matlab Madness and the Imposter Syndrome

Contrary to the order of the title I wish to talk about ‘Imposter Syndrome’ first.

Since I began my Ph.D journey I have encountered both elation and despair in terms of progress within the space of six months. I have been given various shards of advice so far, the most notable being “Don’t ever compare your Ph.D to someone elses, it will only chew you up”. As easy as that is to say, it is not as easy to do. You hear people around you talk about their progress and, when you’re stuck in a rut with something (such as Matlab), this can be disheartening. Some advice of my own would be to fear not, the ruts come and go, but if you keep at it you will get through it.

Meeting with and presenting to people much more experienced and educated than yourself can also leave you doubting your abilities. Not that they try to make you feel this way, but the questions fired at you when the answer escapes you can be particularly embarrassing. Luckily for me so far I have had my supervisors in the room who have pitched in and helped me with the questions. The key is to not over think too much (a common pitfall of my own) and remember that you are on your journey to becoming an expert, and that no one expects you to be one at this stage.

My undergraduate degree for example was Physical Geography which encompassed the entire physical world from atmospheric circulation, oceanic circulation, fluvial (riverine) processes to ecology (at all scales), glacier dynamics and volcanoes. Such a wide range of topics does not mean that you could possibly be an expert in any of these areas upon completion. In hindsight I wish I had done a more focused degree, but then again I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do at the start of my degree so a broad range of topics was beneficial for me.

With regards to presentations and such, you just have to bite the bullet and get it over with. The more you do it, the more comfortable with it you will be.

Over the past few months I have been making myself more familiar with Matlab, a multi-paradigm numerical computing environment offering the production of graphs, histograms, pie charts, contour plots (both filled and unfilled, 2D or 3D), application of numerical formula to every element (cell) in a matrix (worksheet), isolation and extraction of a particular section of data which may be interesting, the list goes on. Matlab is a truly wonderful program that much is certain.

Above is a plot produced in Matlab of flow in a river, the arrows highlighting the direction the water is moving, indicating cyclical nature of water around a river meander apex. I guess you could think of Matlab as a more advanced Microsoft Excel, used almost entirely through the command prompt and running scripts.

I had encountered it during my undergraduate years while writing my thesis to produce contour plots of flow data from Kluane Lake in Canada. I had never made a multi-functional script which could calculate and produce multiple calculations and plots with the single press of a button, and by changing one value would result in changing the entire sequence of calculations to produce different plots. This has been the main source of my elation and despair over the last few months. I am fortunate enough to have an office mate and a supervisor who are both incredibly proficient at using matlab, and both have been invaluable so far.

I have learned how to import data which may not necessarily be in the correct format for Matlab, I have learned how to change and manipulate the data, I have learned how to change the dataset I am working from to produce different figures, and I have learned how to plot figures, even multiple data sets on a single figure.

This video goes into detail on what a matrix or an array is, how to use or change single elements (or cells) of an array, how to use or change sections (rows/columns) of an array, and how to reshape and transpose an array. Pretty fundamental stuff.

This video goes into detail about how to use IF and ELSEIF statements  in Matlab. This is vital for writing scripts. I got the basics from my officemate, but this video gives you the basics too.

The official Mathworks forums, and unofficially, Youtube and Stackoverflow.com are great places to look if you ever get stuck. Just type your problem into Google or Youtube and away you go. It’s that simple. It takes a bit of practice, but just keep at it and you’ll get there. My biggest challenge was that using Matlab requires a different way of thinking than what I am used to, it is more step-based and logical than I would normally think in my day to day life. Like I said, practice makes perfect, keep at it and you will get over the hill which you have found yourself at the foot of.