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.
