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…
Tropical North Queensland: The reef
This is the second instalment in a two part series of my recent holiday to Tropical North Queensland. If you want to read about the plants, rainforest and a general overview of the fantastic holiday, have a look here. This blog is about the other natural wonder of North Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef. It is…
Tropical North Queensland: The Rainforest
My husband and I recently escaped the busyness of work and city life of Sydney and took a trip to Tropical North Queensland for two weeks. It was an amazing holiday, filled with adventure and relaxation. We both wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef before the bleaching gets worse and we’ve never seen it…
Muogamarra Nature Reserve
Last Sunday, myself and a group of friends and colleagues from UNSW went on a bushwalk in Muogamarra Nature Reserve. We’ve recently started a new group called the “Botanical, casual, youthful and social group” (N.B. youthfulness is up to the member’s own personal interpretation). We’ve been on a few walks, each one has been fantastic…
Exploring the Botanic Gardens
As you may have read in my previous blog post (here) I have partnered with the Australian Botanic Gardens, Mount Annan, for my PhD and I am undertaking a big project looking at the effects of climate change on Australian species using seeds collected and stored at the PlantBank which is part of the Botanic Gardens.…
First day of fieldwork!
In March this year, I took a giant leap and commenced a PhD in Biological Science at The Unviersity of New South Wales, Sydney. For many months before this I was weighing up this huge decision of whether to continue with more study. A combination of an excellent supervisor, great project ideas and an increasing…
Dr. Suz Everingham 