DeepEarthScience

As a scientist, your are expected to be at the boundary of the current knowledge in your field. You should know which state-of-the-art methods are used. The newest findings should be know to you. And more importantly, you should know what is still unknown. As a PhD candidate, you are learning to become a self-sustainable researcher. Therefore, a PhD candidate should, in the end, be at the boundary of the current knowledge of his subject and maintain that knowledge. So how do you keep up with the fast expanding frontier of knowledge in your field? My trick to stay at the boundary of the current knowledge is to keep an eye on the most important journals in my field. You can do this even if you are not subscribed to the journals. Every journal has an RSS feed (I know this is an ancient tool, but it works so why don't use it), that gives information on the latest publications of the journal. Most of the cases, it releases the abstracts of the latest accepted articles. Jour...

Today I am working at home, because some strong and skillful looking men are renovating my roof vault (in Dutch: "dakkapel"). Luckily I had one thing on my agenda, editing, editing and editing. I have to rewrite my first scientific paper, because I want to send it to my co-authors in the beginning of next month. So today it is about making order in all my chaotic brain waves and scribbles, during the loud noise from above. The title of this blog post is my way of living for the last few weeks (oh and "be concise and focus", but that is another story). I've started a course in English article writing, because as you would have noticed (and some of my good friends commented), my writing is not perfect or even close to perfect. So, every wednesday, I am sitting in a classroom with 12 of my peers, learning about the wonders of the English writing process. One of the most important lessons is: "Writing is editing, rewriting and reviewing". But what...