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Time Evolution of a PhD Student ' s
Mood A Review of My Time as PhD
Student of the Research School ESSReS
Christoph Gregor Hoffmann
Keywords Post-graduate education
Earth System Science
Research school
1 Introduction
I had quite a few doubts whether my PhD project will have a happy ending for about
two years. I think that this perception is common to many PhD students: the enthu-
siasm drops steadily in the beginning, when all the individual smaller and bigger
problems appear and hinder apparently any progress. But sooner or later most of the
PhD students get the project going and even start to enjoy their work again!
This is a short re
fl
ection on how my PhD project evolved and how ESSReS
in
c analysis, but the story of my personal perception
during the project. I would be happy if one or the other present PhD student could
recognize himself in some situations and maybe learn something from my expe-
rience. Please note that many people supported me during the project and I apol-
ogize for not mentioning all of them appropriately, particularly my working group
at the University of Bremen. The reason is my aim to focus this story on the PhD
student
fl
uenced it. It is not a scienti
'
s own scope for action based on my individual experience.
2 Time Evolution of a PhD Students ' s Mood
To guide through this personal side of my project without going too much into the
scienti
c aspects, I recapitulated my mood with respect to the PhD project during
the major phases. Figure 1 shows this mood development
with a touch of humor
normalized to a scale between zero and one.
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