Lessons from failure: A researcher’s journey through a disastrous experiment

When in January 2020 I started my PhD in Plant Ecology, I felt a mix of enthusiasm and anxiety. I knew the journey I was beginning would be arduous, and that was even before the several events that ended up making it even tougher than I expected. What follows is a recap of perhaps the […]

FYORD Travel Grant Reports: Master’s students travelling to international conferences

Visiting an international conference as a Master’s student In July, the International Conference on Seafloor Landforms, Processes and Evolution (ICSLPE) was held for the second time. This year it took place on the beautiful island of Lipari.  My name is Luisa Rollwage and I am a Master’s student of geophysics at Kiel University. During my […]

Pipefish: Who’s the best dad?

Across the animal kingdom, there is a wide array of ways in which parents care for their offspring. When we think about animals with “good parenting”, we quickly think of close-to-home examples from mammals like ourselves: species in which the female can produce milk to feed her children who stay with their mother for some […]

Overcoming lack of funding as a PhD Fellow to attend EGU 24

I’m Mafalda, a 29-year-old Portuguese woman doing my doctorate at the University of Kiel with a Portuguese PhD fellowship that allows me to develop my project with the cooperation of GEOMAR and the Portuguese Institute for the Sea and Atmosphere (IPMA). I’m doing my PhD in Marine Geology studying a natural submarine system where carbon […]

FYORD Travel Grant Reports: Impressions from the largest European geoscientific conference (Part 1)

With this blog post, we would like to introduce and launch our new cooperation with FYORD! FYORD is a joint network by CAU and GEOMAR initiated to connect and support Early Career Researchers of the marine sciences from Master’s to PostDoc level. After occasional exchanges in the past (see our blog here), we are very […]

From Hypatia to Marie Tharp – Some women you should know

This blog post was inspired by the books “Forces of Nature – The Women who Changed Science” by Anna Reser and Leila McNeill and “Women in Science – 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World“ by Rachel Ignotofsky. Both shed light on a wide variety of women in science and their contributions. Here, I was […]

At the beginning there was bureaucracy

Last year in summer I finished my Master’s degree. I was, and still am, very much in love with science, and enjoyed my research-focussed program a lot. No surprise that I wanted to pursue a scientific career, and that I was very happy I had managed to secure a PhD position as the next step […]

The Perspective of a retired Hiwi

HiWi is the abbreviation for the German term ‘Hilfs-Wissenschaftler*in’, which translates to research assistant, and describes a job position for students, often offered by faculties or research institutes. I am definitely not talking about the second definition given by German Wikipedia. For nearly six years I’ve been one of many HiWis, going through research groups […]