Monday 28 November 2016

Week 8-12: Mega catch up post!

Hello once again everyone, I am sorry for not uploading in the last month but it has been one hell of a busy month! While my partner returned home to Sweden I had to take a single parent role which has truly left me exhausted. However, now that we have been back home for a week I finally have a few minutes to myself and I have some time to write a BIG catch up blog.

For all the people who do not want to read the entire blog post I have made a quick summary of some of the key events that occurred in the last month. I will go into greater detail below:

·         Issues with payment finally resolved
·         I participated in an algae workshop, which was a lot of fun although 75% was in Norwegian.
·         Prepared for course, packed for my trip to Sweden and a variety of travel stories and travel issues.
·         Participated in a bioinformatic pipelines course.
·         A week in Umeå meeting friends.
·         Participated in an ethics course
·         My evolutionary digest will be published soon.
·         I have taken over journal club.
·         I am now the PhD student representative for the Faculty of Biosciences and Aquaculture at Nord University. 

So, I will start of by saying that I have final resolved all the issues that I have been having with payment in Norway! At the end of October I was worried that I would not be able to pay for food for me and my son, due to an error made by some of the administration department. When I had asked them what was wrong, I was told “oops I pushed the wrong button”. There was not even an apology and I think these people just live in their little bubble and do not understand that their mistakes can have major impacts! However, I do not want to complain now, everything was resolved and I do not have to worry about this any longer. With that I can now buy winter tires for my bike which I so desperately needed with winter setting in, ow and I could buy the new Pokémon! ;). 

During the same week, I had also been invited to participate in the first ever algae workshop at Nord university the very next week. I was hesitant at first due to most of the workshop being held in Norwegian, but I was convinced by my supervisor that it could still be useful. It turns out that my knowledge in Swedish really helped and I can honestly say I understood around 60/70% of all the Norwegian. I was introduced to many people in the industry of macroalgae(seaweed) production and sales and I got to see the beginnings of an industry that could become very important in the future in Europe. It’s funny to think that in Asia eating seaweed is such a normal thing and that there is a major industry around it. However, in Europe very few cultures use seaweed for anything, but I believe that in the near future this could change and the research I am doing on Fucus could become quite important to this developing industry.

So much snow! 
Later in the week, after preparing my computer for the course, I had to take time to prepare the house and my luggage for traveling to Sweden. The trip me and my son would take took over 20 hours and was the longest but most relaxing trips I have ever taken and that is something when considering I was traveling with a child. I got to see some of the most beautiful sights in Norway as I travelled 5 hours north to take the train from Narvik. The bus even took a trip on the ferry as the road meets a fjord. Once we were on the train me and my son had our own carriage for the majority of the ride to Umeå, Sweden. The seat we started on turned into three very covenant and quite comfortable beds. The trip confirmed my love for trains, but the length of the journey really took it out of both me and my son. Once I had arrived I had one day to enjoy the enormous amount of snow that fell in Umeå and then the next day I was off again to Gothenburg by plane. This time it was not relaxing and due to delayed by the snow in Stockholm I arrived a lot later than expected and missing parts of my travel due to the delays.

The accommodation at Tjarno research station.
I arrived at midnight in the pitch black to this big beautiful white house full of rooms which would be my home for the next week. The next day I woke up for breakfast to one of the most beautiful research stations ever set into a very picturesque bay. The course was full of fantastic information and fantastic people, I was new to bioinformatics in command line and the course was a perfect introduction into it. I will now continue the work myself along with the workshops in the Czech Republic I will be attending in January and the people I met on the course were a group of very intelligent, strong minded and fun people, many of whom I hope to have future connections with. During the course, I had the chance to meet Ricardo Pereyra, who is also researching Fucus seaweed. We discussed some factors in regards to my project, he offered some advice and pointed me in a direct which I am very interested in following.

Tjarno research station.
After the course my trip back to Umeå was much smoother and a little less lonely as I travelled with a few of the people from the course about 50% of the way home. Once I got back to Umeå there was not a single day where I did not meet somebody who I missed after my move. I was surprised how many people wanted to spend their time meeting up with silly old me, but it was very nice to see everyone again. After speaking with Ricardo Pereyra during the course in Gothenburg he suggested messaging Roger Butlin, a leading research in the field of speciation.  I was surprised that Roger Butlin quickly replied to my messages and we have plans to have a Skype meeting and further communication.

After an extremely busy week In Umeå, Sweden we headed home back to Norway the same way we came, only this time it would take 22 hours. The first week back home in Norway I had started an ethics course, when I first started the course I was not looking forward to it as I am not a big fan of philosophy which is a large part of the course. However, the course was amazing and really pushed some boundaries in how I look at things. One of the key topics of the course was the species concept, something we has discussed the course in Sweden in great detail, something I will speak to with Roger Butlin and also something I am personally very interested in. The course has now ended and we must write a paper on our research and two points of view, (eccentric and anthropocentric) I could not think of a way to do this so I have discussed with the teacher that I will focus on the species concept and my work.

Yay for me! 
During this week, I also found out that the Evolution Digest that I wrote will be published soon, here is the link to the publication: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/evo.13135/full here it is so you can give it a quick read. I have also taken over the journal club, I have spoken about it on this blog previously. Journal club is when someone feels a paper is particularly interesting they can present to the club as a whole, then we can ask questions and discuss it. The last Journal club was a very interesting topic which discussed great white shark size and what is the biggest (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17746627). The final bit of news I have for all of you is that I was “elected” the PhD student representative for the Faculty of Biosciences and Aquaculture at Nord University. Which means I now have the responsibility of communication between the PhD’s and the rest of the department and organizing social events.

So now that’s the end of another blog post, I have had to rush this post a little and was not able to go into great detail on a lot of the topics due to the large amount of information I have had to convey to you. If you have made it this far I really appreciate you taking the time to read everything I have had to write and I hope you have enjoyed this post. If you have any questions about anything I spoke about in this blog post, please do not hesitate to ask. I also hope to make this blog a weekly thing once again where I can go into much greater detail about what it really means to be a PhD student.