Turns out that it’s actually harder to quantify my work achievements than it is to reflect on the personal side of things.

In and around the office

  • I did a bunch of analysis, which hopefully should allow me to produce 3 manuscripts/chapters.
  • I wrote a manuscript.
  • I have reached nearly 123 k words written in Scrivener since the beginning of my PhD. This is all PhD related, although I used to take notes in Evernote too and it doesn’t include any of my R scripts and reports, so it’s not super accurate… But still a measure of progress.
  • I passed my second year review without problems.
  • I have kept a pretty much paper free office.

Out of the office

  • I presented at an international conference & it went well! I got good questions and lots of people came to talk to me afterwards (I have written a post about the conference, but it’s still sitting in the draft folder… I’ll pop a link here later).
  • I gave 2 talks and lead 2 group meetings within the department. I also gave a talk at ANU when I visited during my field season.
  • I attended a one-day WISE event and partook in some interesting discussions.
  • I completed the second and last field season of my PhD. Your complimentary superb fairy-wren photo can be found below.
  • I did part of my Professional Internship Programme (PIP). I did some work in a seed bank, archived cryptogam project and did seed imaging (you can find some of the images from that project here). All done within ANBG, it was great to gain more insight into what they do there.
  • I taught on 2 fieldcourses: Field Zoology and Field Ecology.
  • I presented a poster, which got highly commended, at our GradSchool conference.
  • I took part in a workshop on jobs post-PhD. It was a very informative workshop and we got lots of great tips about networking. Those allowed me to successfully network at a conference - yay!

wren

Oddball items

  • I have discovered #ChronicallyAcademic on Twitter and I am grateful to know that the community is there. If you are an academic with a disability and/or a chronic condition check their site out. If you are not, check it out too.

Low Points

A lot of my PhD work focused on rewriting a manuscript and exploring a number of avenues for the analyses. I have made quite a bit of progress, but I need to put finishing touches on majority of it before it can be considered “complete”. Often it felt like I was running around in circles and not getting anywhere.

New PhD students join the department when I’m away on fieldwork and so I miss out on meeting people and establishing new connections. What is even worse, most of the people I know in the department have left or are about to leave.

I still haven’t sorted issues with my demonstrating earnings getting unfairly taxed. It’s been very frustrating to be shrugged off constantly.