A good PhD start

Hello again! First of all, let me congratulate myself for writing a second post to my blog: it is more than most can say.

I will not offer you any well thought reflections or incredibly interesting snippets of knowledge. I have thought of some things to talk about over the last few days, but the ideas come and go so fast I cannot even take a note to remember them. Also, I am sleepy.

So I would rather just tell you about the first days of my PhD and why they have been exciting.

First of all, if I did not misunderstand what my supervisor told me (I really hope so!), in about a month I will be going to a congress for a short contribution (i.e. a poster) related to my Master's thesis. This is exciting, but I have known it for months now.

Yesterday my supervisor told me that we should take the first part of my thesis, complete it, and present it for publication as a scientific paper. She also said she is very busy this semester, but my scientific writing English is good enough that I should be able to start writing it by myself. The senior professor in the group will be giving me pointers. As you can imagine, I was really excited and very, very scared. But still, I thought 'well, my thesis is not all that, it is a pretty obvious result if you think about it', so it will be a low impact magazine, which is fine for a first paper.

Today, we had a meeting, we (well, the professors -supervisor and senior professor- did actually, because I am pretty much clueless) outlined what I should include in the paper. And when the senior professor went on to suggest a magazine, my supervisor interrupted and said she wanted to try the Biophysical Journal. And the senior professor was like 'Yeah, sure, it will be difficult but let's try, if we do it right it can have some impact'. 

Now I am excited. This is one of the most relevant magazines in my field, with an impact factor over 4. For more relevant magazines you need to go to beyond the field into more general things: Cell, PNAS, Science, Nature...

Am I going to work hard? Yes, I am going to work hard. So hard.




PS: Please, please mercilessly critizize my writing, that is half the purpose of this blog. (But take into account I was half asleep while writing this).