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 19

considered a research stay of several months. Although not directly part of the
ESSReS program, the prospects of such a research stay were underlined in ESSReS
from the very

first, so that I was directly prepared to apply for a stipend at the
German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
And exactly when my mood reached its minimum (8), I received the acceptance
of my DAAD proposal and I decided to use this opportunity as final attempt. Just a

few weeks (9) were left before my departure. During this time I prepared the stay by
restructuring all the open questions, approaches, preliminary

findings and opinions;
I grouped all the pieces of the puzzle and tried to estimate their rough position in the
overall picture. This helped me to clarify the aspects about which I wanted to learn
something during my stay at NCAR.
And indeed, I achieved the breakthrough of my project during this research visit
(10). Looking back, there were several factors contributing to this breakthrough:
First, the preparation, which helped me to carve out the missing links. Second, the
intense discussions with my hosts, of course. They are experts in this field and had

an unbiased, still optimistic view on my project. They con rmed from the begin-

ning my thoughts about the missing links and supported me steadily with their
experience. Third, the change of the typical workdays, which allowed for more and
longer phases of continuous concentration at NCAR where I was unknown and did
not have any other duties than my own research. And forth, the excitement, which
comes with a new, inspiring environment.
However, the major precondition for this success was my work during the two
years before! Although my efforts appeared to be wasted at that time, I have to
admit in retrospect that it was only possible to piece this puzzle together in Boulder
using the experience that I had gained during all the attempts before. This surprising
turn of my perception became one of the major eye-openers for me with respect to
scienti

c work.
When I came back home, I had prototypes for each of the parts of my work: the
retrieval, a validation of my dataset, a comparison to the NCAR model and some
more ideas on top of that. In the meantime, we had applied for a prolongation of my
project and also the DAAD stipend had shifted the end of my funding a bit.
Altogether about one year (11) was left for me to re ne all the prototypes, to write

the publications (Hoffmann et al. 2011 , 2012 )and finally to write up my thesis. This

was only little time for all these tasks, but I was again enthusiastic enough to
contrive a sophisticated final timeline and to finish more or less everything in time:

the happy ending of my PhD story!
I think, that the development of my PhD project was not extraordinary negative
or positive. Contrarily, I think that all these phases of different moods can be found
in many scienti c work is always

connected to uncertainties. But tight deadlines of the projects and particularly of the
funding put pressure on the scientist, so that these uncertainties might

c projects, also after the PhD phase. Scienti

finally be
perceived as stress or frustration. And this transformation from uncertainty to
frustration works probably particularly well at the beginning of a PhD project, when
positive scienti c experiences, which strengthen the optimism, are still missing. So,

I suspect that it is easier for experienced scientists to overlook failures and