Time Evolution of a PhD Student’s Mood—A Review of My Time as PhD Student of the Research School ESSReS - Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach in Earth System Science - page 17

Fig. 1 The development of my mood with respect to my PhD project — with a touch of humor
normalized to a scale between zero (should I quit this job?) and one (the job of my dreams?). The
numbers correspond to the same numbers in the text (in brackets), and mark the individual phases
that are described

c background of my project. I worked on the
application of Carbon Monoxide (CO) as a tracer for mesospheric dynamics
(Hoffmann et al. 2013 ). Abstractly speaking, the project included three major parts.
First, a technical part, during which a measurement device should be constructed
for observations of CO radiation in the atmosphere. Second, the observed data
should be analyzed numerically to gain the quantities of interest. This

Just a few words about the scienti

of
the data is particularly important and complex for atmospheric observations. And
third, the retrieved data should of course be used to contribute to the work on
current scienti

“ retrieval ”

eld.
This project structure including technical work, data processing and validation,
and the scienti

c questions in the

c interpretation is roughly common to many projects in Earth
System Science. Also common to many PhD projects is the fact that major steps
depend on each other and have to be performed consecutively. This poses imme-
diately problems if the first part takes longer than expected or even does not work at

all. And this is where my story begins.
The technical phase started with waiting for commercially produced parts of the
measurement device. One of these components had to be designed specially for my
project and it turned out that this was more dif

cult than expected. Several months,
which were not included in the original schedule, elapsed without major progress in
the lab and my project seemed to be already stuck (1).
In the meantime, we had the first ESSReS research skills development course,

which included project management and time planning. With a grown awareness
for these topics, I made a timeline showing the milestones of my project. It became