I often feel lonely and out of place in science. My lab mate's dissertation defense reminded me of this.

I don't mean to disrespect him or begrudge him his degree. He earned it. His research is worthy. It's just, for him, getting a PhD was about doing projects for his PI, fulfilling degree requirements, then tying it together with a narrative, so he could get a degree and a job. Most of my peers are like this.

I'm here because I need to understand better what life is and how it makes itself. I have big ideas and burning questions. They have profound meaning to me that I must uncover and share with others. I left a career and joined a PhD program just to secure the space and support I need to pursue my research agenda.

My peers care about science, but mostly in a generic, pragmatic way. They want to "be scientists" or earn degrees. They're playing the game, not chasing specific answers and meaning. That's valid, but it feels so empty to me, and I feel like I just confuse them.

#academicchatter #phdlife

Being in research most of the time is: You're doing this for passion. It's not important enough to pay you like the highly skilled one-of-a-kind expert you are.
And also sometimes: You're the only person in the country who knows anything about this. Please come and advise parliament on what to do.

#AcademicChatter

I'm reading the recent preprint on LLM "hallucinated" citations in scientific papers and was surprised by a non-LLM-related statistic it mentions: 61% of arxiv submissions are in LaTeX. I would have guessed a number much closer to 100% —that's math bias for you.

#academicchatter

Today I've done:

- helped some user
- realized I will disappoint another
- had a video chat with a colleague elsewhere about a survey paper we want to write
- cooking for lunch
- washed a curtain (after cleaning the window, yesterday)
- watered the very thirsty garden

#academicchatter

Everything (well, not actually, there is so much more) wrong about German university hiring in one picture:
- PhD position advertised with 65% pay of TV-L FU (i.e. 100% are probably 4.188,38 €/month)
- PostDoc advertised with 50% of the same bracket. Yes, lower than the PhD position
- Postdoc advertised with 100% of the same bracket

To be fair, the PhD position and the 100% #PostDoc are in the same institute, and the 65% PostDoc is in a different one, but all three are in the same faculty.

And technically 50% and 65% would mean that it's also fewer working hours....but let's be real, that does not actually apply here in reality.

#FUBerlin #IchBinHanna #AcademicChatter #PhDLife #PostDocLife