Name: Emily Thompson
Job: Postdoc in particle physics
Source: Quantum Diaries [original post from July 2012]
Excerpt:
Even more difficult was going from feeling like an expert in my thesis topic to suddenly being thrown in the deep end of a new topic amongst other experts. I found I wasn’t the only one who experienced that. Before I began, a few senior postdoc friends of mine who wrote their PhDs at the Tevatron said that their first year at the LHC felt just like being a brand new graduate student all over again and that it was hard to feel like anything really substantial had gotten done during that time, just because there was the additional learning curve thrown in. When I looked a little sad, one of them said “well for you, since you’re staying on ATLAS…maybe only 6 months.”
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