Lots of work – exciting times!

Dear Diary,

at the moment, I am very busy with work. My agenda is pretty packed until Christmas and there are a lot of things I want to get done before the Christmas break.

I am now trying to teach myself the basics of OpenSesame so that I can program my experiments in Python in an open-source environment. Some of the tasks I am planning to program are going to be done on an Android tablet so that’s going to be interesting. I am making reasonable progress and have finished most of the easy parts of the programming. Now I have to figure out how to do the tricky parts.

I have also just submitted the final corrections of the paper I submitted a while back. The editor has sent it to the publisher and they are now formatting everything correctly. They sent me the formatted version and I had one last chance to make any adjustments. I also had to upload high-resolution figures and provide some missing information. I sent everything off about an hour ago. I am not sure how long it takes before the paper is made available online. But when it is made available, it is considered published. I hope that it still happens in 2015 because then I have two publications to my name for that year. That’d be nice.

I’ve also had meetings with my supervisors and the students that want to do their research projects with us (those are basically equivalent to a Master’s thesis). That’s also going to be quite some work because I’ll be involved in the day-to-day supervising of those three projects. They are also quite interesting, though. If it least one of them can something out of this that is publishable, I’ll have my name on it as a second author which would be great. All three of them want to publish their work, though – so in the ideal case, there’ll be three publications. I don’t quite see that happening, though. But we’ll see – that’d be amazing.

I also spent some time looking at the data I’m currently collecting. I should get the last missing piece of it on Monday and then I can run some preliminary analyses. I scheduled a meeting with my supervisor and promotor to discuss the data on Wednesday. I think we need to discuss how exactly I am going to write all this stuff up because now we have a lot of data and there are multiple story-lines. I don’t think it makes sense to put it all in a single paper. So I might split everything up into two papers. But we’ll have to see about it. It also depends on the results to some extent. We’ll keep collecting data until at least Christmas, possibly a bit longer. I have data from a bit more than 60 participants now but I’d actually like to have something like 150. We’ll see whether that’s possible. That’d be great, though.

Anyways, all of this is pretty exciting because there are a lot of very interesting things happening. The “problem” is that they are all happening at the same time and it’s a lot of work to juggle them all. Exciting, though.

Lots of squash this week

Dear Diary,

after I got back from Bremen on Monday, I went to my weekly squash training at 9. I was playing like shit but I was good to be doing something and getting tired.

I arranged to meet with a friend to play on Wednesday night as well. I went to yoga at around 5:30 and then met with SB at 9:00 to play squash. I played for almost two hours, the last 20 minutes of which I played against one of the trainers which was ridiculously exhausting. He let me run like crazy and I ended up being too tired to retrieve the last couple of balls in our last game. It was a lot of fun, though.

Then, yesterday (Friday), I went to a tournament here in Groningen. My muscles were still pretty sore but it was okay after I warmed up a bit. It was the first time I signed up on the C level. I ended up finishing 4th but that was mainly because there weren’t that many very strong players. I was a bit slow that day because I’ve had an exhausting week and my muscles were still sore but overall, I was very happy with my performance. It was good to see that the guys on that level are not all out of my league. I could beat about half the guys I saw playing that night and even the ones I lost to seemed beatable.

Overall, the difference was mainly that everyone on that level can play “nice” squash. Everyone’s hitting nice lengths and you get a lot more tactical rallies. On the lower levels, you’ll still have some guys that are pretty uncontrolled and compensate for it with brute force and being quick. Very different to play against.

I am curious how much squash I’ll be able to play in the next couple of months and how my progression will go. I am still far away from being able to win a C-level event but it’s definitely fun to play against people that are all at least difficult to play against.

Tomorrow we’ll have a competition match in Steenwijk. I’m curious how that’ll go. :)

Another weekend with the family and my grandpa’s funeral

Dear Diary,

last weekend, I was with my family again. I spent quite a lot of time in Germany in the last weeks because my grandfather was very sick and I tried to see him as often as possible.

Last weekend, we celebrated my aunt’s and uncle’s birthdays on Saturday which was very nice. It was good to get together with the family and celebrate a happy event. :)

I stayed for the weekend and visited hang out with my brother a bit. He was visiting from Canterbury and I haven’t seen him in a while so it was good to catch up with him. We visited our other grandfather on Sunday and it was good to see that he’s making progress. He was transferred to a home for the elderly for a short-term stay and was scheduled to go back home two days ago. We got a short update that he got back home okay and is feeling much better already. So that’s really nice.

Then my brother and I went to see our grandma. She was alone at home and it was the day before she had to attend her husband’s funeral. We wanted to take her mind off of things a bit and just spend some time with her. She’s been holding up really well (considering the situation) but it was sad to see her grief and sadness.

The day after, we attended the funeral. The event itself was quite nice (again, considering the situation). He church was being renovated so it was done in a big room in one of the buildings belonging to the church. There were big windows and the sun was shining and it felt a lot less churchy. Which I liked a lot.

The eulogy itself was quite nice as far as those things go. I personally found all the religious aspects of it extremely irritating but tried to ignore those bits. I knew my grandmother was very happy with it and that was the most important thing. I just didn’t want to hear any bullshit about God’s mercy and how great and mysterious He is. He doesn’t provide any comfort to me. But well, I was able to tune it out and remember the good times I had with my grandfather – and there’s no shortage of good memories so I was just grieving and remembering the man I loved. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that he’s in a better place now. To me, he’s just gone. And it’s sad. But such is life and I am thankful for the time I got to spend with him.

After the funeral, we had the classic Nothern German Hühnersuppe und Butterkuchen get-together with the extended family. I went straight back to Groningen from there.

Overall, it was a nice weekend. The funeral part of it was sad, of course, but in a way, it was also good to process those feelings and be around the people that are going through the same.

I can give a presentation at NVP

Dear Diary,

I submitted an abstract to NVP (the Dutch version of Psychonomics/TeaP) and just got an e-mail that let me know that my submission was accepted as a presentation. Pretty nice! That means I have to put more work into the preparation but it also means I’ll be able to reach more people.

Most of the people in the audience are basically potential future employers so it’s a good chance to pitch my work and let everyone know that I’m nearing the end of my PhD and will look for a job soon. It’ll also present on the very first day which is always good because it makes it easy for people that saw the talk to approach you later during the conference. So there’s plenty of time to network.

Looking forward to the conference!

Contract will be extended by (at least) two months

Dear Diary,

the other day, I got an e-mail from one of the secretaries that let me know (informally) that my request has been granted and that my contract will be extended for two months. This is because I am compensated for my work as the chair of a university organization. I’m still waiting for the official confirmation from HR but it’s good to know that that’s going to happen.

On top of this two-month extension, I’ll also be able to extend my contract by another 3 months using the funding I recently acquired. That was part of the budget we listed to give me some more time to finish up certain experiments that we were planning.

That’d give me five additional months in total. I’ll see how many of those I am going to use. My promotor would prefer if I handed in my thesis at the original end date of my contract (Sept. 1, 2016). That way it looks good in the department’s statistics (so they can say, “our PhDs finish in time!”). If I have a thesis to hand in by then, I’d actually like to do that as well. Because I can still be employed as PhD for a couple of months after that but then the pressure would be gone and I could just do a couple of fun things towards the end.

Another alternative would be to be employed as a post-doc for a couple of months. Say I hand in my thesis on September 1. Then the reading committee usually takes one or two months to approve it. That means that I allowed to defend it. But having an approved thesis would also allow my supervisor to employ me as a post-doc (you don’t actually have to have defended your thesis). So if I can be employed as a post-doc for the three months that we got the money for, I’d make more money than staying on my PhD salary for another three months.

So, I think, my goal should be to try an finish my thesis by September 1 and then see whether I want to work for a couple more months (and with which type of contract) or not. On the other hand: it’s good to know that I have the five-month buffer in case I don’t manage to finish stuff by then. God knows what happens in the last year: it’s virtually impossible to plan this stuff anyways. We’ll see.

R.I.P.

Dear Diary,

the last weekend was very sad for me. I’ve been going to Bremen quite a lot in the last couple of weeks. My grandfather was very sick and I wanted to see him as often as I could. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and it was clear that he’s going to die relatively soon. It was kind of hard to follow the whole process and see him slowly but surely get weaker.

I went to Bremen on Friday night to drop a friend at the train station and then went to see my grandfather again. I stayed with him for a bit more than two hours but he wasn’t really awake anymore. He did seem to realize that I was there and reacted to my voice but that was pretty much it. I just sat at his bed trying to emotionally prepare myself for the inevitable.

But no amount of preparation was enough to brace myself against the sadness. Neither the sadness I felt while he was still alive that evening nor the sadness I felt when we heard he died early the next morning. I have the tendency to philosophize about these kinds of things and engage my head rather than my emotions. And I am sure there’s a time I’ll write a more philosophical post about losing a loved one. But this is not the time. This is the time for the raw emotions that can’t be put into words that elegantly.

You will always be missed. And you will always be loved.

Going to the States early next year?

Dear Diary,

as part of the new project, I’ve been talking to my collaborators in the States and they suggested I come and visit them (together with my supervisor) early next year. The idea is to go to Ohio in late January, early February. We have to talk about it and figure out the details and a lot of things need to be arranged but overall, both my supervisor and I are keen to go.

it’d probably be a 2-3 day meeting with the people there. I’d want to stay a little longer than that to make it worth the trip. So i was thinking of visiting friends at Penn State, at Syracuse and/or Philly, and then maybe go down to North Carolina for a short vacation (but maybe I can also present at the lab at Duke) and visit some friends there. That’d be pretty awesome!

Kick-off of new project

Dear Diary,

today, we get the first half of the grant that we’ve received. It’s quite a lot of money and marks the official start of a new project for me. This will be the project I’ll work on for the last year of my PhD. There’s money to extend my contract a little bit, go to conferences, meet with my collaborators in the States, pay participants, and pay student assistants.

I’ve talked to my supervisor about the whole situation and my involvement in the project. We agreed that I should be in charge of the project and assume the role of the “project leader”. He’s still going to be in charge on paper but I am going to do the majority of the work and make the day-to-day decisions regarding how things are done. That means the way I work will change a bit during the last year of my PhD: I’ll be able to delegate quite few tasks and won’t have to do every little bit myself. I hope that I’ll still enjoy this type of work and that this will translate into higher productivity.

Overall, this is pretty exciting. We’re now starting to talk about the first experiment we want to run. Figuring out the details and planning everything is always fun – not that much fun on the administration side of things but that’s fine. We’re going to have dinner tonight with my supervisor and the two student assistants that are going to be involved in the project to discuss some things informally and celebrate the start of the project.

On top of that, I might also supervise master students’ research projects. From what I understand, there’re three students that are interested in working with me on things related to my work. I’ll have to see what exactly they want to do and whether they find other alternatives etc. But I might end up supervising at least one of them (not sure I have time to supervise more than one, we’ll see). That should also be an interesting experience…

So, yeah, lots of changes at the moment. Exciting times. And a lot of work ahead of me. That’s a bit scary but also very exciting

Fontainebleau was awesome!

Dear Diary,

our trip to Fontainebleau was fucking awesome. We left on Thursday evening and after about 7:30 hours of driving, we arrived at the campsite at around 1:30 am. It was 16 degrees when we arrived. We set up our tents in the rain and went to sleep. The first day, Friday, was warm but not quite dry. There was some drizzle every now and then. We went to check out some boulders and hiked around one of the areas to check it out but everything was wet so we couldn’t climb. We went to the city instead and checked out the palace and walked the grounds.

The next day, Saturday, was very sunny and around 21 degrees. We went back to the same climbing area and hang out in the forest for a while until the sun and wind had some time to dry off some of the boulders. They weren’t completely dry but at least not dripping wet anymore and we made our first attempts at bouldering. It was a lot of fun and quite humbling. The main problem for me was finding proper foot placements.

The weather continued to be good with warm but humid nights. So in the morning, everything was a bit wet but it was sunny and windy enough that the rock dried quite quickly. So on Sunday we got a lot more climbing done. We went to a different area and it was very busy all over the place because the weather was so ridiculously good that half of Paris seemed to be out and about.

On Monday, the weather was still amazing, but a lot more windy and not quite as warm anymore. Perfect climbing conditions, actually. We started to be a bit tired but climbed until we could hold on to the rock anymore. For me, it was mainly the skin on my finger tips that seemed to disappear and started to get quite painful. We decided to leave a bit earlier than planned in order to beat the rush-hour traffic around Paris. We left at around 2:30 pm and even though there was a lot of traffic in Paris, it would have been a lot worse two hours later. We then hit some traffic on the E19 around Antwerpen and got delayed a bit. We had a half-hour break at the Belgian-Dutch border for some food and were home at around 10:30 pm.

Overall, the trip was super awesome. I was traveling with BB and his friend JH. I met her in the States last summer and once before when she was visiting Groningen. I knew she was climbing pretty hard (7b-ish) at one point but hasn’t been climbing too much lately (some injuries and shift in interests). I was a bit afraid that the two of them are going to go and work on all these super hard problems and I’ll have to try and figure shit out on my own, feeling bad about holding them back. But it turned out that JH and I were actually kind of climbing on the same level. I’d say she was a bit better than me (obviously a lot more experienced) but she was also smaller so I could often skip moves she had to do so most problems were a bit harder for her than for me which brought us to the same level. So we ended up spending most time working out problems together which was a lot of fun.

Fontainebleau is really super beautiful and there’s a practically infinite amount of stuff to climb there. It certainly wasn’t the last time I went!

Abstract submitted to TeaP

Dear Diary,

shortly before I left for Fontainebleau last week, I submitted an abstract to the German version of Psychonomics, the TeaP. I sent in the project I am currently working because the conference isn’t until the end of March so I should have enough data to tell a story by then. But of course it’s always a bit hard to write an abstract about what you’ll present about if you don’t know what you’ll present about, yet.

If they won’t let me present, I should at least be able to present a poster. Which would also be nice. I was able to present there last year and hope I can do it again this year. We’ll see.