Why would I even write a blog post about my year 2019, then? Well, every fail comes with a win, and vice versa. To demonstrate: The first win of 2020 is that we booked a nice hotel in the Austrian Alps for cross-country skiing. The first fail, associated with that (and the actual reason for writing the blog post): I came down with a cold, and need to stay in the hotel room. And, again, as an attached win, I get to enjoy this view:
So, without any further ado, here's a list of my 2019 win/fail pairs:
|
Win |
Fail |
|
Finalised a manuscript |
Rejected by 5 different journals |
|
For a grant proposal, got together
a team of amazing researchers from 13 different countries who
agreed to collaborate with me on a cross-linguistic project |
Proposal has a <10% chance of
being funded |
|
Started learning Natural Language
Processing (and data science, and programming in general) |
Still need to improve a lot before
I can actually apply it in my research, or for looking for jobs
outside of academia (New Year’s Resolution for 2020) |
|
Started supervising my first PhD
student |
Issues with funding beyond the
first year of her PhD (mainly due to stupid university
bureaucracy) |
|
Started teaching |
Not sure how happy my students are
with me hijacking their “research methods in clinical
psychology” course and turning it into a course about statistics
and open science |
|
Learned that if I get an ERC
starting grant, I’ll be guaranteed a professorship |
Downloaded the manual for writing
an ERC starting grant proposal, realised that the manual is 50 pages of
densely written bureaucratese text, started wondering if I really want a
professorship that much... |
|
Data collection for new project
going well, very competent research assistants |
One of the testing laptops gave
research assistant a strong electric shock and stopped working |
