read me

The main reason for this blog to exist is to open the doors of academia and present some aspects of the daily life of PhD students and postdocs. To doctorate or not to doctorate? This blog tells parts of my PhD story - and life after the doctoral defense.

The blog tries to be like one that I would read, short and pretty, informative and fun.

The writer herself 

My outside academia option would have been working as an economist. I graduated as Master of Business Administration and Economics 2013 with economics as a major subject and math as a minor subject. The most special part of my story is that I decided to aim for PhD in my freshman year. As I knew that I would stay for long in academia, I studied lot and completed Bachelor's and Master's degrees in less than 3.5 years in total during which I also started the studies for doctoral degree. The suggested completion time is 5 years. How is this possible? Well, the Finnish system is flexible: I participated in the first classes for Master's degree in my second year at the university. Still, I had time to do two study abroad (Johannes Gutenberg Universität von Mainz 2011 and Stanford university 2013).

I defended my doctoral dissertation in August 2019 and continued as a postdoc in Aarhus, Denmark where I started as a research assistant in February 2019.

History of the blog

The blog started as a travel blog when I went as "Visiting graduate student" at Stanford University for one semester. The opportunity felt extraordinary and I was very thankful for finding things out and having applied. I liked writing here and decided to continue to write about PhD studies. Here the language changed from Finnish to English. The first years were surprisingly heavy which resulted as an empty year in the blog. However, this blog rose from the death on Jan 2015 thanks to support from a course of the Doctoral School of the University of Vaasa. Then, I visited Aarhus Denmark, for research during my PhD.. Second rise from death happened 2020, after (moving and) settling into Denmark.


I hope you like the writings - or at least the pictures. Feel free to comment!


Btw, the blog address has a meaning:
c -->Carita
seikkailu --> adventure (in Finnish)

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