Warning: spider image at the end of the post

Does anyone else get task paralysis when they schedule out their days and posts? Just me? Or are we still lying to ourselves?
I’m joking, of course, but I swear my productivity drops the moment I write any of my plans down.

Anyway, I live in Sydney now.
At least for the next couple of months. 

I’ll be doing the same research I’ve been doing in Tromsø, just on the aging mice, and then compare how they are doing. It’s actually much more exciting than I made it sound, I promise, at least to us liver Biologists. 

I realised that I haven’t actually shared, apart from a couple of microscopy videos on social media, what I’m doing and how my PhD is going, but I am thinking of making it into a vlog type of thing, but not that super exciting and funny type of content that many scientists on social media are putting out.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that type of content, but our lives usually aren’t that exciting, and I don’t think I am that funny all the time, so just to set the expectations (wink wink). 

So I just finished my second year (out of three), and some of the anxieties about publishing and defending are definitely becoming more prominent. In general, I still try to tell myself that things will work out just fine, but I’d still prefer that I got on a little faster with some of the experiments and published something already. There are also a lot of questions of what to do after, or how to do it, because I feel there are fewer and fewer jobs in academia available, and I would like to go back to Neuroscience and ALS research (despite THE liver being THE most important organ in the body, no, my boss didn’t make me write this, why do you ask?).

I remember when I was a kid, everyone, from parents to teachers, would tell us that science is a stable career, not just at home in Croatia but everywhere in the world, but the world has changed so much in the couple of decades that I find it difficult to even think about a permanent position – it’s like almost everything turned into a hustle and grind. Perhaps things will change to the better soon?

At least I hope I won’t have to do any exams anymore, ever. It’s a particular type of stress I never learned how to deal with.

Thanks for keeping with me through another ramble session,

From the land down under,
Mina