Productivity, achieving goals, overcoming obstacles and handling rejection.

Those four concepts in the title of this blog are talked about and experienced regularly in academia and during a PhD. Sometimes these skills are assumed of PhD students, sometimes they’re learnt along the way. But these are some of the most important skills that are not easily taught that you need to complete a

Doing a PhD in isolation

As you may know, or have experienced, doing a PhD can be a hard slog. It involves long hours, juggling multiple tasks and dwindling motivation as the years fly past. Now, throw in a global pandemic and you have the perfect storm. Full disclosure, I am in a really lucky position during the Covid-19 isolation

Taking on an international conference… alone!

Thanks to a great scheme at my university (UNSW) I was able to get some funding in 2019 to fly over to Belfast, Northern Ireland, and attend my first international conference- the British Ecological Society’s annual conference for 2019. UNSW has a scheme where every PhD candidate is allocated a generous sum of money to

Presentations

In the few years of doing my PhD I have had many opportunities to present my research, both to the scientific community and to the public. I’ve presented at conferences, at university, in schools and even in the 3 minute thesis competition. I have won a few awards that I am so grateful for and

My time spent with Sydney wildflowers

A particular aim for one of the chapters of my PhD is to answer the question: Are plants flowering in Sydney earlier than they did in the past, due to warming air temperatures? The fieldwork that I get to undertake for this chapter is really cool! It involves weekly observations of flowering time across 40

Running a large experiment

It took months of planning, a season of fieldwork and a full year of glasshouse work to finish the first large scale experiment I have ever completed and the first experiment for my PhD thesis. It was huge. I collected tens of thousands of seeds (and you can read about the fun part of collecting

[Attempting to] Beat the Second year PhD blues

As I approach the middle of the second year of my PhD I can finally understand what fellow post-grad students around me have been talking about all this time- the dreaded “second year PhD blues” have hit. I have debated whether or not to blog about this idea/my feelings for a little while. However, I’ve

Tasmania

Tasmania was the final destination on the long list of fieldwork for my PhD (see my previous post about all my other fieldwork fun here). I had the time of my life in Tassie and wanted to share my travels with you! Here’s what I got up to: Day 1 Let’s fly, Jetstar! After a flight

Oh, the places you’ll go! (when you do a PhD in ecology)

5 months, 5 states/territories, 4434km of flights, 9695km of driving and many hours of bush-bashing to collect a total of more than 50,000 seeds from 38 native species…. …. and I’m done! I have finally finished field work for the first few chapters of my PhD! It has been a tiring but amazing adventure and

Kioloa and the importance of undergraduate fieldtrips

In September, I volunteered on a third year field course for five days. The trip was at Kioloa Coastal Field station and was a plant ecology course where students would come up with their own hypotheses and then collect data around the field station to then analyse and write a report on the results. My