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...