Welcome
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Dear reader,
I am so glad that you somehow ended up on my blog!
In this very first post I will introduce myself, share my own research path and explain the goal of this blog.
I am a former scientist in Biophysics. I have spent quite some years in public science, but I would say my path was never straight-forward.
I actually started out very far from the Natural Sciences: studying a Bachelor of Arts in "Arts, Music and Media Communication" in the cozy German city of Marburg. After two semesters, realizing that this was not the right field for me, I changed to a Bachelor of Science at the same university. However, I was undecided if I wanted to do Physics or Biology, so I started both. In the end I stuck with Physics, mostly because of the friends I made (yes, physicists are actually a bunch of very nice, interesting, slightly nerdy people). So in the end, I got my BSc of Physics with some extracurricular Biology courses.
Then I moved to Amsterdam for a Master of Science in "Physics of Life and Health". It was a two-years research oriented program with one full year reserved for up to two research internships. I decided to do two half-year internships, one of them in sunny Australia. I stayed on for a bit in the lab of my last research internship in Amsterdam, working as an assistant researcher, until I moved to France for a 3-year PhD project in Biophysics.
After graduating, I worked for 1,5 years as a research engineer in a water science lab at the university, but eventually decided to leave the public science domain (I will write about my reasons in another blog post).
Which brings me to now: I decided to focus on what I enjoyed most during my brief research career - efficient presentation of research. At the same time I want to share what I have learned to maybe help any young students, PhD students, researchers out there.
I have been to my fair share of labs, but I always found that a significant part of my education should have been on how to actually navigate the whole “being a scientist” thing. The only course on soft skills I was ever able to take was during my PhD studies: on scientific writing. While it was a helpful I found myself still asking so many other, in my opinion very relevant questions like:
How much time should I spend reading scientific literature?
How do I cope with having a rather strict thesis supervisor?
How to best communicate my results, orally at a conference or in a poster?
How to get out of a rut when all my experimental data seems to be useless?
How can I effectively review and organize all my literature?
Are all the other PhD students struggling just like me or am I the impostor?
All of these things is what I would call soft skills for scientists.
However, in my experience I was not to prioritize such things. I was supposed to spend hours in the lab experimenting. After all the scientific environment is extremely results driven.
Even exchanging with my fellow PhD students was not always that easy. It can be quite a drastic conversation starter to ask “How often per week do you think about quitting your PhD?”.
So that’s why I set out to write this blog. To share my experience and hopefully transmit some knowledge and inspiration, and essentially help you to be a better scientist.
In the blog I will write about three main categories:
I) Information and tips how to best visually communicate your science. We are all working so very hard to obtain results and it is a shame if they are left unseen.
II) Lessons I learned during my own time as a (PhD) student.
III) Very practical information and resources, such as a ready to use Latex thesis layout, tips on software etc.
Therefore, dear science student or scientist, I hope you are here for the long run and most importantly I hope that I can provide you with some useful information. Approach this blog like a research paper: Take from it what is relevant for you and scan through the rest.
Please feel free to reach out to me for any comments, requests or if you would like to participate by writing a guest post.
As I am just starting to build this blog, if you found anything you like, please share so that it reaches more people.
Karsta
