It was my first trip to Seattle, so during my visit, I also went to check out the University of Washington rowing’s regatta venue. It is located in the Montlake Cut on the south side of campus.

The document has been my focus over the past two years, and I received guidance from my advisor Dr. Laurie Garrow, as well as committee members Drs. Jorge Laval, Michael Rodgers, Jeffrey Newman, and Matthew Higgins. The dissertation is an examination of the effects of schedule depeaking (also known as implement a rolling hub or continuous schedule) on airline and airport revenue and operations. I develop a way to measure depeaking and and build upon past studies that have examined depeaking for its cost effects. I studied six different cases of depeaking in the first part of the 2000s and analyzed them to see what factors played a role in shifts in revenue. In addition, I explored how airlines depeaked their schedules and what decision making processes they used to change flight frequency to spoke airports.

I will be posting my completed dissertation later this week, and including it in the Writings section.

My committee which I finalized in August consists of five members, one of which was required to be a faculty member at Georgia Tech outside of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. My committee is:

Dr. Laurie Garrow, Committee Chair
Dr. Jorge Laval, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Michael Rodgers, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Jeff Newman, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Matthew Higgins, Scheller School of Business

Between writing and running lots of SAS code, I have been interviewing for positions for after graduation. I applied to around 50 positions. So far I have interviewed with Delta Air Lines, LeighFisher, Ricondo, and Sabre Holdings. In the next few weeks I will consider my offers and prepare for a move (if necessary).

A paper I prepared from this work for the Airport Cooperative Research Program Graduate Award Program entitled “Depeaking Schedules: Beneficial for Airports’ and Airlines?” will be presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. in January.

I’ve been writing a lot lately for both my final paper for the Airport Cooperative Research Program and my dissertation. I took a couple of hours yesterday morning to write a CSL file for Mendeley for use in Transportation Research Board publications. The following describes why this is useful and how to use it.

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Mendeley is a piece of software used in academic writing to organize academic papers. The students of my chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers here at Georgia Tech use it constantly. One of the benefits of Mendeley is its use in Microsoft Word to automatically create in-text citations and bibliographies. You can then choose what journal style you want from a drop-down menu so that your citations and bibliography are formatted to be the style of that journal.

One of the most common journals transportation engineers submit to is the Transportation Research Record (TRR), the journal produced from Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting papers. In Mendeley, however, there is no style set for TRR. Thus I created a style, called a CSL file, to be used in Mendeley for TRR papers , following the rules on the TRB website. Below are instructions on how to use it in Word for yourself (taken from theMendeley blog instructions).

First, here is the file zipped: TRR CSL File for Mendeley

Unzip the file and copy it into the following directory (on your PC):  C:\Users\<user-name>\AppData\Local\Mendeley Ltd\Mendeley Desktop\citationStyles-1.0

Restart Mendeley Desktop. Select “View” > “Citation Styles” > “More Styles…” and search for “Transportation Research Record”.

The style is now able to selected in Word.

Disclaimer: The CSL file does not automatically do the excessive citation style that TRB suggests for its own TRR papers, but rather treats TRR papers like all other journals. Thus if you want to do what TRB asks for its own papers, you will need to change the bibliography directly in Word.

Part of the meeting was an election for next year’s leadership. All positions were contested this year, and James Wong won the position of President. I enjoyed leading the chapter as President this past year, and am pleased to pass on the role to James.