In French, explaining science to a broad general audience is called “vulgariser”. To me, this French verb has a very negative connotation. The word implies popularizing science is something dirty. Surely something that should be avoided at all times. If a scientist wants to stay clean, he’d better stay away from translating his abstract ideas and complicated experiments into the daily lives of ordinary people.

A few month ago, I met a Professor who is now a very successful Biomedical physicist. I knew him before from his very nice articles, which he had published in high-impact journals during his PhD research. Those articles included very fundamental theoretical results and at that time very progressive experiments on deep physics. For reasons unknown to me, he had decided not to continue in the same field after his very successful PhD, and got involved in the more application-oriented field of biomedical physics, which naturally results in less PRLs but more publications in medical journals and patents.

Entrepreneurship is a personal character that is mostly used for businessmen, but can also be found in scientists. In fact, as creativity is an essential ingredient for a successful scientific career, I may even claim that there sit more entrepreneurs in a research institute than a company, but I do not insist.

Some business-psychologists describe entrepreneurs as fire-starters because they love to initiate new projects and are always eager to bring a new idea, which they never lack, into reality. But, unfortunately, as soon as the project is in action the joy is over for the fire-starter. Soon it happens that he makes himself busy with a new idea and abandons the older one, even though the harvest time of the previous project has just started.

My first university course was in elementary calculus. The course itself was foremost a repetition of what we had already learned in secondary school and was therefore in itself not very interesting. However, those first days did learn me a lot about physicists. I was surrounded by nerds, geeks, whizzkids. Badly shaved guys, elegantly dressed with shorts, white sport socks, and sandals. Since most of them used to be the best of their class, they (and I am afraid I should include myself in this category) thought they were to a large extent omniscient. During the calculus course, they considered everything to be self-evident, exclaiming phrases like ”of course, tell me something new”. It was absolutely not accepted to admit not to understand something. Our ego’s created a non-critical atmosphere, in which questions were looked upon with suspicion. Indeed it was very unscientific.

Young researchers always are worried about their career and this makes them mostly confuse in their research field. There are bunch of stuff that they should take care of them, publication, new finding, skill, being update, searching next job, getting match with new team and even new research field or culture, etc. If you look back then you can see each of them is a big barrier for others.

In my previous post I described why I find a two-day course, an ineffective training for reducing PhD-supervisor miscommunications. In this post I like to present a suggestion, which I think may be more effective.

By my critical essay I did not want to question the good will of the FOM personnel service and the trainers. Indeed, it is a great challenge for many PhD students to stabilize their position in relation with their supervisors. With all the respect for all supervisors, I also think that they are not classified as the best human resource managers, which is the main duty on their shoulders from the time they become group leaders.

A few days ago, I participated in the second day of the training course “Taking charge of your PhD-project”. This is a one-time mandatory course for all PhD-students employed by FOM, which I estimate to be more than 100 persons per year.

To make a long story very short, I must say I was deadly bored.

My impression from the whole course was the following: “A successful PhD is one who can manage his/her supervisor in such a way that he/she can write a thesis within the exact four years of his/her contract (so no prolongation). Within two days we teach you, all 10 students at the same time, techniques and skills you will need to control your disobeying supervisor.”

He calculates the Fourier-transform of a rational function in his mind. He inverts a 9 by 9 complex valued matrix on the back of an envelope in ten minutes. At the age of 30, He publishes one chapter of a book and 10 articles every year, in 3 of these articles he is a single author. He works 11 hours a day in his room and he is always busy thinking or calculating. He knows the answer to any physical and mathematical question you ask. He must be a genius.