Last May I visited the first large scale international conference (CLEO) during my PhD. I was shocked about the enormous contrast with smaller scale (more specialized) conferences. In this post, I will discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages that struck me during this conference.

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Introduction

Science in the 20th century has been divided into a distinct number of more or less separate disciplines ranging from Mathematics and Physics to Biology and Medicine. This distinction was naturally based on the different aspects of our material and living environment under study. In all disciplines one can clearly define ‘core’ subjects which fall in the traditional categories without any overlap with other fields. However, there is an increasing amount of research taking place at the interface or overlapping between disciplines. For a person trained in one of the traditional sciences, it can be hard to look beyond the boundaries and spot opportunities for cross-disciplinary research. This post presents some aspects of multidisciplinary research encountered when starting up a new research line.

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I am at the last year of my PhD. I started working on a topic which was quite new in the sci community. I also published about 5 articles on that topic and 4 other articles in related topics. Sometimes i had too much pressure to publish my works as it normally happens in a place where you have to maintain a good balance between productivity and novelty of your work (i guess). However, sometimes i feel that i lose my interest to improve my experimental data and losing freedom of thinking about the creativity of the whole work. Sometimes, i also feel that i am running too fast that i dont even care about the trees on the street. Where is the freedom in PhD? How can we learn to be an independent researcher? Hope to have it after the PhD!!!

Being a PhD student for almost three years now, a challenge I keep on running into is assessing the research projects I have done. What I mean by assessing is: judging what is new and interesting about the research. During my Master’s I thought science is all about discovering new physics. But new physics is hard to define. In optics, one may say that all physics is already in Maxwell’s equations. However, sometimes the system at hand is too complicated to solve Maxwell’s equations, in other cases it only provides complicated mathematics.

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