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How to Apply for a Job

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Times have changed. That is for sure. Applying for a job or education is different than 20, 10, or even five years ago. I do want to acknowledge that the demands from employers have increased but as an annoyingly optimistic person, I do want to remind about the possibilities we have now - one being the freedom to be more like you, to show your personality. With +10 years of work experience, I have lived the times when it was encouraged as a new thing to put a few sentences about your hobbies to your CV to show a more complete version of yourself. CVs were way more simple, boring, and in many ways limited compared to these days. One might take the new situation as a demand - we need to compete even with the CVs - but with the technology we have around us, we do not need to make this complicated. And if you are not good with tech, try to find a person like me, who loves to do creative (and organize) things for others. Note! This is not an advertisement to contact me :)  Today's post ...
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How to Become a Scientist? My Study/Career Path (PART 3/3).

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At the time when I decided to continue my studies from the Bachelor's to the Master's and several years of experience working in academia, I knew I would continue to my PhD later on. And I knew I was more than capable of doing it. And so I started the journey to apply for my PhD without a clue that this journey would be one of the longest and most frustrating journeys I would make. After the first rejection, I felt disappointed, but not ready to quit. Unfortunately, the first rejection wasn't the last one. And I can tell the level of frustration was unmeasurable after all that work I did to get in. According to the Excel sheet I collected during this journey, I contacted 28 group leaders and had a meeting with 15 of them, applied to 10 different universities around the world, and finally got into one - the one that is better than many of the other ones I got rejected. Regardless of the frustration, the whole process taught me a lot. First of all, I learned that almost every...
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How to Become a Scientist? My Study/Career Path (PART 2/3).

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When I started my first job in academia I still didn't know what I would like to do for my career. My plan was to buy some extra time to figure this out as my contract at the university was going to be only half a year. And so three years passed. I learned both the beauty and the roughness of academia: the freedom to use your creativity and endless possibilities to learn new things, as well as the fact that (financial)stability is not a word that describes academia at all. Regardless of the continuous pressure and insecurity, I fell in love with science. For a moment I tried to hold on to my old dream of becoming a doctor and applied to medical school (while writing my Bachelor's thesis & later on working full time), by preparing for half a year and spending a good amount of my salary on preparatory courses. No study place, but plenty of information I found useful later on when I started my neuroscience master's studies. I ended up studying for my master's after doi...
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How to Become a Scientist? My Study/Career Path (PART 1/3).

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How did I become a scientist? Did everything go as planned? Did I know since a young kid that I wanted to be a scientist? Let's start from the latter: No, no I didn't know. My dream jobs have changed all the way from animal caretaker to photographer, and to brain surgeon. Moving on to the question of, if everything went as planned, the answer is no for this one as well. Or it depends if you look at only the end result it may look like so, but everything that happened in between indicates that the road hasn't been straightforward. And this takes us to the final question ''How did I become a scientist?'' - the story which I will tell you now. After completing high school, which I did slightly later than people typically do, and while working at the grocery store, I dreamed of becoming either a medical doctor or a pharmacist. This I figured out during high school when I truly enjoyed biology and I was fairly good at it. However, due to my average grades in high...
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A sneak peek Behind the CV

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This is a blog created with the intention to make you feel that you are not alone, to help you find solutions, and to make the change. As you may guess from the name of the blog "Behind the CV", the general theme is career & education, but what do the intentions of this blog actually mean? Let's have a sneak peek behind the CV: The intention no. 1. " You are not alone. " When looking at someone else's CV, things often look quite straightforward. People have done their education, some several, continued from one job to another and possibly ended up in some nice position they now enjoy. The position you can just dream of and don't have any clue how to make it there. Well, this is rarely the case. Behind that someone else's CV there are possibly multiple tries, a bunch of emotions: doubting, disappointment, excitement, frustration..., and definitely not always a straight line. At least I can say this from my own experience and regardless of it bein...
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