#esrlife

[intercrossing-itn]

What does it take to be an ESR?

Hi there! / Hallo! / Goddag! / Hola! / Bonjour! / G’day!

Welcome to the first in this series of ‘What does it take to be an ESR?’ blog posts, written by me (Lizzy), and dedicated to explaining a bit more about the process we ESRs have been through to get the stage we are now at. And that stage is... nearly at the end of our PhDs! (eek!). I’m going to write about stuff like; how we found the job posting and applied for it (and somehow managed to be successful), the enlightenment and sometimes logistical nightmare of moving to and living in a different country, and the standard PhD student-y things like attending conferences and writing the dreaded thesis.  

I guess by writing these posts, I’m aiming to try and encourage other young students to apply for these types of EU-funded, international programs. I’ll hopefully convince you all of what a rewarding experience it has been to be an Intercrossing ESR. Instead of doing a PhD in my home country, moving to Denmark has given me an understanding of a different culture and instilled some personal confidence by forcing me out of my British-bubble comfort zone. Also, to any students contemplating whether to do a PhD, I will try to advise from our own diverse experiences, exactly what a PhD studentship entails; the good, the bad, and the downright makes-you-question-your-whole-life-plan (convinced yet?). So you can decide whether it’s for you or not. I’ll be asking for some input from the other ESRs as well, otherwise it’ll be a bit overly one-sided and I’ll just end up persuading everyone to move to Denmark (really, it’s a great country).

So, this might be a good time to answer the question: what does ‘ESR’ actually mean? It stands for ‘Early Stage Researcher’, which makes us sound like we should be kept in a playpen under constant supervision while we randomly jab around with pipettes and make castles out of test tubes. Luckily, this is far from the truth, though I’ve always found pipetting races to be rather fun. What it actually means, is that we have an undergraduate degree, but haven’t spent at least five years working in our field and also haven’t completed a PhD. Either of these would make us far too experienced to be mere ESRs. Luckily, the latter of these is something we are all well on our way to now (two and a half years in fact!). Then finally, we will be let out of the playpen to become ‘ERs’, or ‘Experienced Researchers’, with a PhD under our belts. This is what all us Intercrossing ESRs are aiming for. The light at the end of the long (and sometimes dark) tunnel. This series of posts will describe some of the things we have experienced along that tunnel, and although we haven’t made it out quite yet, we can offer bits of advice for chugging through.

I’ll hopefully be writing every other week, so look out for the tag #LizzyWrites to see the whole series. The next post will be about how we found and applied for the job, and the wonders of skype interviews!

Stay tuned!

Lizzy Sollars

[intercrossing-itn]

I never thought that spending a couple of days at Bayer CropScience, a plant breeding company in the Belgian town of Gent, would change my opinion about research on plants. I need to confess that until now, I thought that plant research was not important and my interest in bioinformatics was only on human research, particularly emerging diseases such as diabetes that have a high complexity and high prevalence in human populations. This is exactly what I have been doing for the last 2.5 years; investigating the evolution of metabolic pathways using Next Generation DNA Sequencing data from human populations.

However, at Bayer, I attended a presentation on the production of new seed varieties, where they described the whole process in stages; from the observation of a particular problem that could delay or make more difficult the production of the crop, to the bioinformatic analysis of the DNA sequences, and then finally the implementations of the results (the new seed with superior traits such as disease resistance or cold tolerance) to the fields to examine the resulting plant phenotype. This got me thinking how plant research can have a direct impact on the whole society and agricultural economy. 

So just a general piece of advice: Don’t judge if you don’t know, and if you don’t know just ask around...

Alexandra Vatsiou