Physics has this mysteriousness about it. There are so many pop-science books - especially about the craziest things like black-holes and quantum stuff - that caught me very early in my life (I guess I was about 14 or so). From there on I wanted to study it.
Side note: The first consequence from this decision was that my grades in languages (mostly latin and greek) and all the science stuff was okay. I only wanted to finish my ‘Abitur’ and get on with it…
Starting my studies in munich everything went quite smoothly, maths is hard - I did struggle a lot there - but survivable (do all the homework you get!).
For my Bachelor’s thesis I was tasked to calculate some ground states for Quark-Gluon-Plasma which is observered in the LHC in Switzerland. This was my first intro to C++ and to programming in general. To be honest, this was horrifying at the beginning! I struggled to understand how the computer wrangles its data and then things needed to be parallelized! I did not know the difference between release and debug builds which lead me to run my simulations with the ‘▶️’ button in Visual Studio :D. Also, my advisors - themselves PhD students at the time - had a hard time with some things (looking at you Cmake) so at least I was not alone. What I learned here was mostly to just keep trying. Dont give up, ask the stupidest questions imaginable and then you will at least be able to tell yourself that you tried everything.
My masters then was already at the place where I did my PhD afterwards, the MPI for Astrophysics. I analyzed neutrino-data from first-principle simulations of CCSNe. I got the topic more or less by accident while staying a bit longer in one of thge few astrophyics lectures which were held at the TUM at this point in time. My PhD topic was almost the same accident. Ther is always something to do astrophysics, especially when the data is laying around!
This and the time during my PhD is surely the time in my life which formed me the most (only maybe Punk & Hardcore concerts have a similar importance :D). The reason for this is my constant struggle to keep my love for the topic - I mean EXPLODING STARS - and to work with my PhD advisor. My advisor and me did not really get along well which even lead me to re-consider my choice to do a PhD, especially in this position. Much of the issues also came from my side, however. I wasn’t pro-active enough if things went wrong, I didnt ask for help. I was doubting my skills because after one year of work, I had NOTHING to show… And my advisor typically lets his students figure things out by themselves. This can be an insanely good thing, but at this point in time, I could not handle it well.
So what changed or kept me from quitting?
There were a few little incidents where other PhD students were struggeling with the simulation code we used. I helped them to get their pipeline running and it only took me a few minutes. I made some decisions for my simulations which seemed to be the right ones. I improved the speed of the most expensive part of our code during initial phases of the simulation by 30%… Without this my simulations would probably still run :D These things made me stubborn and kept me in. For better or worse :D
In consequence, my advsior and me began to get along better. I probably should have been more ‘active’ from the beginning. We wrote a nice Paper with only MINOR CORRECTIONS after handing this in to the Journal (happiest day of my life!). I passed my PhD exam…
So what did I learn?
- Be pro-active
- Do your thing and be honest to yourself.
- If you are stubborn, reflect and notice that you are stubborn. It can be very unhealthy.
Would I do it again?
Actually I dont know. Despite my PhD journey being mostly a big struggle, it shaped a lot of me. And at least I know I probably will never again do anything as difficult as this :D