Sorry.. as far as blogging goes, I’m not that good at actually telling my own activities and stories, cus I fear that no one really cares about me as a person.

Maybe I can use this Ask to do that; describe a little bit what I’ve been doing. So people can skip if they don’t want to read this. 

My PhD contract ended last year and I was kinda unemployed for a while, but I used that time to apply for jobs (of course) but mostly to write my doctoral thesis and my scientific manuscripts (for publication). I probably shouldn’t publicly disclose the relative percentages of those activities xD. Anyway, I submitted my doctoral thesis near the beginning of this year and it was accepted by the reading committee and deemed good enough to be publicly defended. Meanwhile I was offered a postdoctoral research position to start very near to when I was supposed to defend. But yeah there was a pandemic and my plans kinda changed a lot. My PhD defence was postponed to the end of Summer, and I couldn’t yet start the postdoctoral position because the borders were closed. In practice this meant more unemployment which did strain my finances, but I got a lot of help from my parents and I ended up only losing a little bit of money. I used this additional free time to continue to work on my manuscripts and actually ended up finishing nearly all of them xD. At the time I’m writing this I have 3 first-author papers accepted for publication and another 2 manuscripts with minor revisions which I have submitted back to the respective journals. Gotta make the best of the time you’re offered, right?  

My views of this whole pandemic is a little bit weird. If a pandemic makes people realize what is really important to them (family, close friends, local communities, their elders), then maybe the prior way of life was wrong per se? These things should have been clear to anyone from the get-go. All the senseless travelling and holidays isn’t important in the larger scheme. I was also confronted with this, and I promised myself that I’d visit my family and friends more often than before.