Behind the CV

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...

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...

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...