uitzoeker en wetenschepper
I need my eight hours of sleep. One night of tossing and turning and I’m sluggish the next day. Two of these nights and I start bumping into doors. What I intend to say is: I know exactly when I’m sleep deprived. And I know that state doesn’t match well with doing science.
Hey, good to have you back. I hope you enjoyed your summer. Visited new places, wandered around familiar places and discovered something new. I hope from time to time you thought the deepest of scientific thoughts: Hmm.
Life of a postdoc can be tough. Hard work is frequently repaid by disappointing results, rejected papers and ditto grant applications. Job perspectives are grim. One would almost think: what a dog’s life! But of course it isn’t. Then they would have called it a postdog.
Open up the science section of a newspaper and you will come across an article on the alleged reproducibility crisis in science. According to a recent survey, the vast majority of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments. Had I known that a couple of years ago, I might not have gone through my own reproducibility crisis.
I am getting married exactly four weeks from typing this sentence. It is a notion that is as strange as it is obvious: we have planned for the wedding ourselves and the way calendars work, the date tends to get nearer as time passes by. Still it feels like Far Far Away Land for now. And probably it will feel like that until the day that I walk down the aisle. I know that this is how it goes; I have lived it before. It was exactly five years ago and they called that ceremony my PhD defence.
First column in the series “A doc’s life” on the ups and downs of being a postdoctoral researcher. I have to be straight with you right off the bat: writing in English feels a bit like wearing a straitjacket.