A week in my life as a marine acoustics PhD student
Postcard 12th January ‘25: Aarhus
Here we go. First postcard of 2025.
Back to Aarhus.
Back to our (new) life.
I thought I would start the year by doing a little “A week in my life as a PhD student” 🙂. Ready? Well, that was a rhetorical question.
Sven and I agreed on a challenge to get up at 5 am in January and we started on January, 6th. Well, for me, it’s actually not too much of a change since I already got up between 5:30 am and 6:00 am, even before the Christmas break. But after sleeping until 7-8 am for the past 2 weeks … this week was tough. Well, the benefit is that I also managed to get back to doing my Pilates workouts in the morning, a quick meditation, walking Molly and enjoying a cup of coffee and still being in the office by 8 am 😄.
Monday morning started with 10 cm of snow that had fallen during the night just to be flushed away by pouring rain. It was a slippery slope down to Aarhus 😅. I attended the weekly lab meeting (everyone in our working group who is currently in Aarhus joins to tell what they will work on this week to see if there can be synergies or if someone needs help, wants to join in to learn something, etc.). Afterwards, we had a really exciting online meeting about a potential grand application to continue my fieldwork in the Arctic - if all goes well, maybe even this summer as part of my PhD! I also had my weekly advisory meeting and kind of experienced the legendary “supervisor meeting emotional curve”. Being super excited to present what you have mastered just to leave in a deep valley of learning about what you are about to do next without a real clue on how to actually go about it while realising all the things you have no clue about. I finished off with some programming exercises and was pretty tired, but I surprised myself by finding the motivation to study Danish for another hour! I ended the evening with some Grey’s Anatomy and knitting.
On Tuesday, the weather still did not seem to have anyone returning to work. A storm hit the coast accompanied by heavy rain, snow, and icy whatever water aggregate status you wished for horizontally into your face. So, I opted for the car instead of the light rail train. I spent the morning preparing some equipment to be ready whenever we get a good weather window (hahahahaha) to go out into the bay for fieldwork. I had another meeting with both of my supervisors, a quick catch-up on the fieldwork grant and continued with some programming. After work, I went to join a hot yoga session. It’s really starting to grow on me!
Wednesday morning was reserved for a lab seminar. Our lab leader provides us with a specific scientific paper that all of us read and then there is a certain perspective, critique or future research need that we discuss together. This week’s paper was about a study that attempted to measure hearing in minke whales in the wild. You can find a more easy read of the study here.
In the afternoon, I had another meeting to discuss plans for the potential research in Svalbard. Coming home, Sven and I started a first Danish lesson together 🙂.
Due to some organisational structures, the research section that me and a few other colleagues are formally affiliated with are not located in Aarhus but in Roskilde, which is close to Copenhagen. And there is a section meeting every three weeks to exchange with the colleagues over there. So, my Thursday was long: I left home at 6 am to drive down to the university, join my colleagues in a university car and go to the ferry terminal. We took the fast ferry that connects Aarhus to the Copenhagen island and takes around 90 minutes. Next, we had to travel another hour and fifteen minutes by car.
We joined the meeting, chatted with some colleagues, had a lunch seminar (someone presenting their research while everyone else is stuffing their faces 😅), worked for another hour and then started the whole journey back. I was home briefly after 6 pm. Again, some Danish learning followed by a sofa session and an early night.
On Friday, I decided to do Home Office and snuggled up with coffee and a hot water bottle, I drafted my very first research grant application to hopefully go back to Svalbard 🙂
About this week’s postcard
I wanted to take a picture each day to accompany my writing. Well, apparently, this plan did not make it into reality. But please enjoy some Aarhus January vibes 🙂
Random things I learned this week
Airplane mode
I always knew that forgetting to put your phone into airplane mode would not lead to major incidents, but I did not know the reason why it should be done (and why it should be done kind of as soon as you board or at least when the plane starts to push away from the position). The radio waves for reception and connection from the phone can interfere with the pilots' headsets, creating annoying buzzing sounds when they try to coordinate with the tower!
Tell me how you liked this “a week in my life” and if there are certain aspects you would like to learn more about. 😊
Hug,
