Category Archives: Science

A Great Year, It’s Been

A year ago, I started working at Heinrich-Heine University. On my way to the HR, I remember being very anxious, as it was the first time in almost 10 years that I changed my work place. “What is it going to be like? Will my family be able to handle it? Am I the right person for this job? What are the people that I’ll work with like? Am I going to be happy here?”

It turned out, it was a great decision to apply for this job (thank you, Maria, for forwarding the job posting to me!). Not only do I enjoy the work as it is, I also enjoy working with these incredibly nice and intelligent people. Now, with the first paper and the first conference with new data underway, I think I’m getting there.

And, yeah, I totally should be writing (c) 🙂

Technorama Winterthur

Who knew that science could be so much fun? Of course, I did! But a friend of mine told me that in Winterthur, Switzerland, you could touch the science. I mean actually touch it! The land of innovation found a great way to further the research interest und scientific talent of its young generation: they opened a Swiss Science Center Technorama. Here, the children can have a hands-on experience in biology, chemistry, physics; they can participate in various workshops, and watch shows about the earth, gas, and lightning.

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My June

I know, it’s not over yet. Though I’ve got quite a lot to tell you and I’m afraid I won’t if don’t do it right away.

#1 The most important one

I did it! I submitted my doctoral thesis! It took me almost 5 years to run those 11 EEG experiments, to write them up, and in the meantime to have a child. This thesis is thus a summary of my recent professional life. It’s a  milestone and the end of an era. I am excited and, at the same time, scared like hell to move on.

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This thesis was possible only because two wonderful people decided to put their trust in me. Dear Carsten Eulitz and Aditi Lahiri, you are the BEST scientific supervisors and mentors one could wish for! I am grateful for your time and advice. It’s been an honor to work with you! And we still have three papers to publish together 🙂

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The Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

I have been to a lot of conferences over the past years, some of them being really comfy workshops for a very closed community and others being huge machineries with thousands of participants and attendees. My first international conference was a mixture of a closed community and attendees from all over the world. The name of the conference is Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing and in 2011 it was organized by the Stanford University in Palo Alto. This conference has a reputation for very strict peer-reviewing, therefore, my boss was against my applying there with the topic of my current project. He didn’t want to take chances with our common work, so I decided to apply on my own with the topic of my MA thesis. As it was not work-related, I also could not get the funding from the DFG in case I got accepted. So I also applied for a conference grant at the Academic Staff development and eventually won it.
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