In research, budgets are being squeezed everywhere. We are all suffering cutbacks in vital areas such as capital equipment spending, salaries and the quality of office biscuits. Often the target of the cutback is determined by the age old management technique of cutting the thing that management is most confused Read more…
I have at various times of my career been unemployed for short periods. As I mentioned in previous posts, this is a pretty typical part of research as we are almost all hired on short term contracts. Your research might temporarily be on hold and is probably being picked apart by Read more…
Yesterday I decided to bail on the 19:00 till 20:00 talk. Turns out trying to do a 12hr stint at a conference is a little bit exhausting. So instead of late night conferencing I sat in the now blissfuly quiet media room, drank coke and wrote up some notes from the Read more…
Last night I learnt two things. That firstly in Vienna I can get amazing tacos and secondly Austrian Netflix has a great selection of movies that I can’t get on UK Netflix. These are the important things to discover when away on a conference. 06:40 – Seeing as I spent a Read more…
Hotel beds are a special kind of bed that are strangely comfortable when you first lie on them but progressively less comfortable the longer you lie on them. This means that my first day of EGU has not started well. 06:40 – Beepy noises are loud and unpleasant and should Read more…
The title of this post might sound harsh, but it’s exactly how I felt the first time I was at a scientific conference. I hadn’t prepared very well for attending this conference, because I was focused on presenting at this conference.
In the not too distant past, I hated conferences. To me they were awkward and would entail me feeling anxious and stressed for days beforehand. I understood why I had to go to them and that they existed for a good reason, but I really, really, really didn’t want to go Read more…
A check list of things that every academic will be doing as they start the new year
As I covered a couple of weeks ago i recently attended a very different seminar/conference/symposium which was objectively awesome. The morning after was a bit hangover-y but such is the price you pay for ‘socilaising’. And because I was worried I hadn’t traveled (and drunk) quite enough yet, last week I was off in Read more…
This week I am attending the conference Optical Fiber Sensors (OFS) in Brazil. At the conference I am presenting a poster on some work I did earlier this year. I’ve done posters before but this time I decided to go a bit more infographic/cartoony with it.