I work from home - I like to watch videos, to pretend some sort of human interaction.

I like watching videos on interesting topics, probably another thing that makes me feel like I'm interacting with people whilst working from home, alone, all day. I'm going to keep a log here for you, on the ones I think people might like to know about.

30/10/13

I watched (mostly listened whilst writing up some notes, it's a long one) the Commons select committee hear evidence on women in Science Technology Engineering and Maths (STEM) careers. As a woman at the beginning of her STEM career it was a good watch, opening my eyes to the amazing amounts of support that there is out there. It was good to hear about  the people that are fighting our corner with things such as the Athena Swan Charter, and support through career breaks.

My supervisor has said to me before that it's not easy to be a woman in science, and that to ensure success I need to make a strong headway from the beginning, this was touched upon in the evidence heard. I really hope I don't become a statistic and become another woman in a STEM career to slip out of the "leaky pipe".

I'm here to stay!

29/10/13

This video came up on my twitter feed, so I watched it with a cup of coffee, and replied to the twitter comment, and got a retweet from the BES for my efforts! Professor William Sutherland giving a lecture on improving decision making in the policy environment. My PhD is based on the scale at which policy decisions are made, so the video was highly relevant. There were three specific highlights for me.

Firstly, I'm innocent!! Professor Sutherland declares those of us that have started our PhD's post 2006 are innocent of the problem surrounding bio-fuels. Although that isn't really something I would have looked into anyway, it's nice to be told I'm innocent!

Secondly, the future. The scale at which policy decisions are made is dependent on how far we look into the future. The BES get together every year to assess which issues are looking to be important in the future and which of those require action. The future is something that within my PhD is a big problem, where do we stop? Which future are we planning for? How many generations? Questions I need to answer.

Thirdly, the policy checklist he presents at the end. At the end of my PhD I am aiming to produce a framework to help make decision making in ecosystems services more fluid, check lists would definitely work well within the framework. Also I love lists, and lists of lists, but specifically lists of lists of lists!

Doctoral Training

This is the lovely building I work in when I'm in Cranfield. It's light, bright, airy and reminds me of a Pizza Hut. It's just VERY quiet - which I find quite difficult to comply with. I don't come up often, but I love it here when I do.

I'm here today to attend my first 'Doctoral Training' session 'Getting Started with your Research'. As I started my PhD at an odd time, there wasn't any training available until now. At seven months in it's all a bit 'better late than never'. I definitely got some good ideas from the session, mainly on supervision. The best thing I took away from it was how to do a few of the things I'm already doing, an awful lot more efficiently. More time saved though means finding more things to do - I'm sure that won't actually be a problem though. Who's for cassoulet??

I'm booked onto four more sessions in November, so here's hoping that by December I'll know what I'm really supposed to be doing. Or at least the way in which I'm supposed to be doing it.

Blogging Beginnings

Welcome!

I’m Zoe, I’m a PhD Student, I live in Leicester, I study at Cranfield University and I love outside.

To begin my blog, I thought I would relay the reasons why I have decided to start blogging. There are many reasons, but they all fit into three main topics.

More things to do means more things done.

This is how I work, the more I have to do, the more I can achieve. If I have one thing to do, I will do it, but it could take a while. If I add in more and more activities, my brain becomes more focused and I get things done both faster and better.

I work from home which means I am constantly surrounded by the lures of washing up, CSI (mostly Miami, solely for Horatio) and cooking elaborate meals for my other half. Whilst all of these things are important, none of them are productive. A blog on the other hand could be productive, I can tell you about the cool science I’m involved with, the ups and downs of doing a PhD, and just generally have a platform to vent my frustrations and get giddy when things aren’t going too bad.

Public outreach, career progression, and jargon

I feel like what I do for a ‘job’ is interesting, and exciting. I also know that I have friends who love to ask me what I’m doing and hear about all the things that are going on in the ‘Ecosystem Services’ world. The research I am doing is not just something that is restricted to a lab and to people that know the ‘jargon’, I’m studying the way that the whole world functions, and how everything in it is connected and reliant on everything around it. THAT IS SO EXCITING. Whether you want to admit it or not, I am doing exciting work, and I am so lucky that I get to do it, it would be selfish not to share.

Inspiration

A very close friend of mine began writing a blog (which I wish she would continue) and whilst reading it I could really see her in it, and I got excited about it and decided I wanted to do it, but I’m no fun as I don’t have a cute little baby whilst progressing in my career for a massive global corporation. But with the amount of people who ask me what I do, and the amount of people I want to keep updated on what I do, I decided that this was going to be what I do.

I have recently attended an ‘Early Career Researchers’ conference, hosted by BESS, the NERC funded programme that sponsor my studentship. At the conference I was surrounded by other PhD researchers at different stages of their PhD’s, it was an amazing atmosphere (something I will definitely go into another day) and one of the talks suggested building up our public profiles and blogs were one of the ways...so here I am...Aloha!!

Soon...

I’ll tell you all about my PhD...and a little about me...