I never thought that I would be writing a blog. I have been following some blogs, not very many, but the idea never really got to me that this might actually be a thing that I would enjoy doing. We will see, a lot of blogs probably start with exactly that very thought and with in-advance-apologies for not continuing the blog. Let's just wait and see where this one is going!
I hope that writing about my PhD project will help me to remember thoughts and ideas about the project. Maybe it will even give me the opportunity to learn about other PhD student in the same area, who knows?
Well, as you might have guessed from the title of my page, I am working on taxonomy and systematics in Phoridae. How I got into that field I might want to elaborate some other time but what I can tell you right now is that I immensely enjoy working with these small flies even though or probably because they are a family within the Diptera that not so many people have been working on...
I started my PhD in October 2008 - exactly a year ago. I guess that many PhD students have experienced the same thing: one year sounds a lot longer than it really is! When I started I thought that by now I would be finished with the first article. I thought that I would be done with an essay that we call "doktornanduppsats" in Sweden and that I would have visited my external supervisor in the US already.
Well, none of this has happened yet although I am a good way into the first article and I started planning my trip to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County today. On the other hand, I think that I have learned a lot already, I have taken some very interesting courses and I have some very nice ideas about my project.
One course that I took recently was a course in biodiversity informatics at the Swedish Natural History Museum (my home institution) in Stockholm. This is actually where I got the idea to both start blogging and setting up a website. Rod Page was telling us that if you aren't online you are invisible. And I think it might be time to get visible!
Another course that I took recently (last week, actually) was called "Gender Perspectives in Evolutionary Biology". Marlene Zuk from UCR was the main teacher on the course and I really enjoyed it. I was a bit disappointed about the fact that we were only women in the course, it would have been interesting to have not only one but two gender perspectives in such a course. But other than that I really enjoyed the course and it made me aware of the fact that it is immensely important to think about what and how you say it when communicating science. I think that is one of the most important messages for me from the course and I will try to always keep in mind the importance of it.
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