We are SO nervous!! It has been a pretty full-on week, My Love has been offered a Post-doctoral position in Quebec, Canada and I have been
offered a fully funded PhD position in Potsdam, Germany! (I received the email
at 5am this morning and 14 hours later I am shattered – but too anxious to nap!) my Love also has three more interviews over the next week and I have a meeting with
my dream lab in Paris looming in the coming weeks!
So, you might be wanting some background information now, we
are two Neuroscience students from New Zealand. My Love has just submitted his PhD
in which he studied hippocampal place cells, researching the mechanisms behind
the coding of time in episodic memories. I have just submitted my
Master’s thesis, in which I was looking into the effect of food and food-related
hormone Leptin on anxiety. I have to be honest – I’m a stress eater and was
just trying to scientifically justify my need to eat Thai Red Curry on my most
anxious days! So now we are onto the next step – a Post-doc for my Love, and a PhD
for me!
It is a weird feeling of being in limbo, we have been
applying like crazy for so many positions and pulling our hair out when no one
has offered us anything solid. For the first month or so you just get
interviews and ‘we are processing all the applications, we will be in touch
shortly’ and then the ‘we are really interested in you but do not currently
have funding for another Post-doc/PhD student, we will keep in touch’, they all
seem to show interest in you but none of them are giving you the ‘Yes! We want
you in our lab and we have the money to pay you! Jump on the next plane!’ ….
Okay so you're never going to get that message exactly, but a yes is all we
were waiting for!
Now we each have a ‘Yes’, and I almost feel nauseous at the
thought of saying yes and therefore cutting off any future offers, or saying no
and waiting for these future offers that may not arrive. As for my Love he has an
interview with Stanford this weekend! Stanford! The first thing that comes into
my mind when I think of research at Stanford are the Stanford Prison Experiments – but that doesn't stop it from being ranked the 2nd
best research University in the world! So he has postponed accepting his
position in Quebec for a week to see how that interview goes! His other
interviews are for Singapore and Trondheim, Norway.
I have been trying to nap all afternoon to catch up on the
minimal amount of sleep I got – but every time I close my eyes I just get so
nervous about moving to Germany! So we have bought two bottles of German beer
and a bottle of cider so that hopefully I can sleep tonight! So my Love, Taco (the
pet rat), and I are trying to relax tonight, and get ready for some travelling.
This weekend we are dropping Taco at her Grandparent’s house and the next weekend
we are flying into Paris!
Oh and the funniest thing about me getting a position in
Potsdam and my Love getting one in Quebec? I speak French and my Love speaks German –
not the other way around!
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