SURVIVAL KIT FOR STUDIES  “I don’t get why math is supposed to be the pinnacle of intelligence”

Blanca moved from Spain to Germany to do a PhD. In our Survival Kit study programme, she tells us why Germans can be weird sometimes, why it’s often frustrating work on a PhD and how trash TV often saved her day.
 

The biggest cliché about your school – and to what extent it’s true:

That the students are very smart and competent and have this complex mind. I mean, there are some mathematicians who are very smart but in reality a lot of people are just normal people who happen to be good at math, as myself, I think. There is nothing that feels very fancy about it: you go to your office and work on your computer like everyone else. I think people have different intelligences for different things and it’s taught very poorly in school, so people think it’s that obscure thing.

What’s your everyday life like?

I wake up whenever I want to, which usually turns out to be around eight. When I go to the office, I have a very productive day and I stay there until four or five pm. Now, with the pandemic, I go to the office twice a week because I have to coordinate with the other person, who’s in my office that we’re not there at the same time. I sometimes talk to my supervisor and bounce some ideas with him. When I have to do home office, it’s a bit lazier. I start doing work slightly later and it’s very hard for me to do research and home office combined. I usually work on this software that I made, and try to get it to work for an aerospace problem. Other than that, I’m writing articles or work on my thesis. Sometimes what I’m doing doesn’t work and I just give up for a couple of hours and then go back. When I stop working, I either go to hip hop class, watch some TV or cook.

What couldn’t you have done without?

I guess, for my work, really just my laptop – and in general: my friends, my phone to communicate with my friends back home in Spain, good roommates, good food and trash TV. Which day at university will you never forget?

This is kind of a weird one. In my first month doing my PhD, one day my whole department organized a barbeque. I thought everyone was going to bring a bit of everything and we were going to share, because this is how we do it in Spain. But when I went there, everyone had just brought one sausage or steak for themselves and nobody shared their food. I had brought nothing but luckily some colleagues ended up sharing with me and offered me some of their stuff. But, honestly, I thought this was so weird. I had a big culture shock.

If you could start over at university, what would you do differently?

In my first year, I spent a lot of time feeling very stressed because I didn’t do a lot but then I found out that all PhD students do that. In the first year, you just don’t have a clue what you’re doing, you don’t even know what your topic is. I think I would’ve spent my first year feeling way less guilty.
Other than that, I’m not sure if I even would’ve done a PhD in retrospective. I thought it would be great fun going back to studying but I don’t think I’ll continue my career in academia and it’s very different from doing a regular Bachelor or Master’s degree. It’s nice to have a PhD but you only learn about a very specific topic and it only makes sense if you’re incredibly passionate about it and want to dedicate your life to research and academia. I sometimes wonder if I could’ve evolved professionally in other ways and acquired more skills if I had worked in a company.

What did you find the most annoying?

Aerospace Engineers, who can be a tad condescending and always speak to you as if they think everyone understands what they are saying, and if you ask them to explain something to you they just repeat what they said without further explaining it. Communication can be hard with some people in this field.

What has often proved a lifesaver for you?

I don’t really know. I guess it was often very frustrating to reach all these dead ends, when the things I worked on wouldn’t work out. Sometimes it was good to just stop working for a bit, to take a break or just leave it entirely for the day and watch some TV. Sometimes the inspiration came back at unexpected times.

What did you eat when you were running low on funds?

I got to be honest, PhDs in my field are often very well paid here. I’m very lucky with that, so money was never a problem.

What question do you always hear at every family gathering?

Is it very cold there? Are you eating okay? Are the Germans weird? Do you need anything from Spain? That kind of stuff. They also try to ask me about how my PhD is going but I don’t really know how to answer that, because I myself don’t really know how it’s going and it’s also weird to talk to them about deep research on mathematical optimization for aerospace.

What are you proud of?

I learned how to make a great sourdough bread. No honestly, I’m proud of landing this opportunity and that I’m pulling through even though it’s really hard. It seems that I’m finishing in the required time period. And I’m proud of making it in Germany. I was very scared before I moved here, because I didn’t know how it was going to be. I feel like a made a little life for myself here and that I’ve made great friends.

What was the highest price you’ve paid for a good mark?

I don’t really get grades but the first conferences where I had to speak were a bit nerve-wracking. I prepared a lot for them and I felt very watched and tested. Writing articles in general always take so much more effort than you think, like the little graphs you have to include. You think it’s a quick thing but then you end up spending hours trying to make it look nice and then you realize the data was wrong and you have to start all over again.


University is also about learning for life. What’s your takeaway so far for the future?

I learned a lot about what I like to do and what I don’t like to do. For example, I don’t like working alone but I like programming. Doing the PhD was something between wanting to go back to my studies, wanting to move from Spain and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my professional life – and I think, I’ve achieved that. I figured out a lot about where I think my career is headed. I was able to experiment with a lot of things, meet a lot of different people and I learned how to cope with really annoying people while being very nice. That’s a very valuable skill.