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Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til One goal…
Happy new year my dearest!
I've been quiet since Christmas eve, and there are two main reasons for that:

1) I needed the time to relax and be with my family - preparing my self for what will be an intense year. 

2) Someone broke into our car and stole half of the presents we got for Christmas (for example Anders' present for me 🙁 ), and our suitcase with clothes and stuff. This was a mentally exhausting experience, which also stole a lot of time since we've been on the phone with different insurance companies and the police and everything. End of the story is that even though we had the best travel insurance in the biggest insurance company in Norway, we got nothing, since we happened to be inside our own apartment when it happened (the car could have been parked at exactly the same place; if we had been somewhere else when it happened, we would have been covered). After the day when it happened (in the middle of the day, the 27th of December) when I cried most of the day, I've wanted to just put this episode behind me, and I've tried focusing on all the fantastic things I've got in my life - Alexandra, Anders, health, amongst others, and I haven't really felt I had any time for blogging. Hope you understand.

But now I'm back! Back at the University, back on the blog, back with my research.
Maybe you've already guessed why I'm saying this will be an intense year... 
2016 is the year where I have really just one, main goal: to finish my PhD. There is a lot of work to do be done, and I think it will be hard, but with the support and help of especially Anders, and also my fantastic supervisors, I think I'll manage! I will of course share (almost) everything from the last part of this trip, from a Master of Science to becoming a Doctor 😉 Hope you will follow me!

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til I didn't make it (#phdlife no. 284610798)
I'm a little bit upset and angry at my self right now, since I didn't even get close to my milestone/goal of these last 14 days :/ I was supposed to finish the analysis part of my paper, but then it turns out I haven't even touched it, since I've been busy giving talks. Going on "tour" around Norway to give talks just takes more time than I like to think that it does - I guess it's time for me to realize this now...
I have to become better at planning (not that I'm horrible at it, but I'm definetely not perfect either...). 
Tomorrow I think I have to start the day by making a DETAILED plan for the next week - to get through what I should have done the last 2 weeks. I understand that I have to change my next 14 days milestone a little bit, but I don't want to make the biggest changes either; I want to try to get very close to my original plan, which means three things: 
1 part PLANNING
1 part STRUCTURE
1 part DICIPLINE
Come on, Sunniva, you can do it! Don't let yourself down 😉
love this new notebook from IKEA - perfect size, and perfect amount of coolness and pink <3 
Hope you all had a great weekend, and sorry that I'm not happy and inspiring just now - at least I'm honest... I'll keep you posted on snap (sunnivarose), with #teamsunnivarose <3 <3 <3

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Publisert 2 kommentarer til I have a title!
One of the results from three very good days here at Soria Moria (except my article number 2 is actually really starting to look like something, and I've had some great discussions with Sunniva Supervisor; not only about this article, but also the next one - that I'm so eager to start at 😀 ) is that I actually got my self a working title of my thesis...! (OMG)
I don't dare share it with you guys just yet - I need to sort of "feel" it for a while... But it has words like uncertainties, modelling, thorium, nuclear, and reactor in it <3
It actually feels really good just have an actual title for your thesis document 😉
PS: I managed to reach my goal to get up and start quite early every day this week, but I must admit I'll have to spend some time during the weekend to get through all the rest of my goals. I think I'll manage, though 🙂
You guys have been great too - it's so cool to get snaps from all you hard-working, goal-chasing people! Go #teamsunnivarose <3

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til References, figures, and references

...and figures.

And tables!

FML.
No, I'm joking, obviously, but my arms and my back hurt, and my head feels like it weighs a ton. And my eyes are dry and sore. And I'm going back and forth with respect to how to best represent my data and my results - and what to put in this article, and what to put in the next article (and I do remember, very well, that I was accused of self plagiarism one and a half year ago, and I'm of course very scared that someone will accuse me of something like this again, unless I'm extremely careful...:/)
I guess this is #phdlife <3

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Publisert 4 kommentarer til I need your help – Join my team!
As I mentioned yesterday I would like to do a sort of let's motivate each other thing, where we could share pictures on Instagram (I'm @sunnivarose) or Snap (I'm sunnivarose) or Twitter (@sunnivarose here too) - anything to cheer each other up, and to be proud of our selves. Can we use social media to cheer each other up? I think we can, and it would be so much fun:
  • If you're early at the office (or wherever you're working or studying), well the tell us 🙂
  • If you've made your self a fresh cup of coffee before you're starting repeating for your exam, then tell us 🙂
  • If you feel like you're stupid, since "everyone else" understand this except you (which of course isn't true anyway, but whatever), but you're not giving up, tell us
  • If you're having a 12 hour day at the university (or office or wherever), share it!
  • If you just learnt something new, be proud and shout out 🙂
  • If you finished something, or started something, let us know!

To do this, we need a tag, and since I want you on my motivation team, the tag is #teamsunnivarose - join my team, I need your help!
Here are a couple of snaps that I've made during this day and yesterday:
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A little update on my plan this week so far:

Yesterday I was all up to date, and I was early at the office - as planned 😀
Today hasn't exactly been the same success: I did manage to be early at the office, but I was also supposed to write for three hours (only done 1), work on the Strength Function part of the uranium analysis (maybe even finish it), plot a lot of stuff, and discuss with Sunniva Supervisor (who is in CERN - which I didn't know when I made the plan yesterday, so that one isn't on me). Then this day just took a totally different turn, and I have almost done nothing...however, it's only Tuesday, and I'm quite confident I'll manage to get through my plan of the week by the end of the week - maybe this is where we can help each other...?
When it come to my writing goal this week, I'm certainly not giving up: I WILL DO 20 HOURS! Tomorrow I'm going on a writing seminar that lasts to Friday, so that's why I'm so positive 🙂 But before that I'm going on "Tidenes morgen" on P13, to talk about fusion...so now it's dinner with Anders, and the some nuclear fusion reading <3
Have a beautiful evening, and GO TEAM!

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Publisert 1 kommentar til Research plan of the week
Hello everyone, and hello Monday!
It's been a while since I shared my study/research plan of the week with you guys, but I was thinking maybe it's a good time to start again. As I was sort of saying yesterday, I'm starting to get nervous about finishing the PhD, feeling a little like I'm drowning in a hole, and I almost get dizzy from trying to just start somewhere... To solve this, I have to do (at least) two things, I believe: 

1) Plan my week (this will help me set goals, and check if I actually achieve them)
2) Get up early, and start working at the office early - every day(!)

I know "early" is sort of a relative term, but in academia, where almost nothing starts before 10:15, I think before 9 is early.
So this is what my (research) plan of the week looks like - there's a lot of focus on writing article number 2 now, as you can see 😉 Hopefully I can soon put this article a little bit behind me, and focus on newer stuff...
Goals: Be at the office before nine every day, and spend 20 hours on writing on that (stupid) second article. I don't know exactly where that will take me, but if I just manage to fulfill this writing goal, I will know by the end of this week, and hopefully then I can "see the light" again.
Anyone want to join me? Maybe we could do a sort of let's motivate each other kind of thing? I mean, I can't be the only one struggling with writing articles/PhD thesis/doing my research/preparing for an exam/Master thesis or whatever... Maybe we could even do a hashtag or something? I'm not exactly sure of what it could be yet, but I'm thinking 🙂
Anyway, wish you all a great start at the new week, and good luck with all your goals! The first thing I'm going to do now is to read through and then send off my current draft of article2 to Sunniva Supervisor - then I can already put the first "check" on my plan 😉
PS: I was at my office at 08:20 this morning - great start for me, so far...

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til OMG – it's real!?!
Last friday (a little bit more than one week ago) Theres successfully defended her PhD thesis 🙂

Two weeks before that she got the theme and title of her trial lecture - which is standard procedure; 14 days before the PhD defence you get a title for a trial lecture, that you are supposed to give on the morning of the day of your thesis defence. If you don't get this trial lecture approved, then you don't get to actually defend your thesis either - so it's kind of a big deal... 
Therese's title was "Nuclear uncertainties in the direct detection of dark matter" (or something like that).
This may seem a little funny or strange, but from that Friday when she got her trial lecture title it suddenly hit me, right in the stomach, that this is actually real: It's exactly 10 months to the date I'm planning to finish my thesis today and it doesn't feel all good. There is so much to do I almost feel a little dizzy - where do I start?
I think have to step up this game if I'm going to have any kind of chance of finishing my thesis by the end of 2016...

Publisert Legg igjen en kommentar til Reading about plutonium
That's basically what I've done today:
I've read...
...and commented...
...and Googled.
The occasion is me being a co-author on an article about (some of) the nuclear properties of plutonium-243. Now I "just" have to write down what I think about the article; what I like, what I don't like (if there's anything), and (maybe most importantly) what I don't understand 😛 
Typical #phdlife.
today's outfit - will make a post about it tomorrow <3 

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Publisert 4 kommentarer til Facts on Friday (we pretend Monday = Friday) – EXPERIMENTS!

Since I wrote about my feelings about programming on Thursday, I got some comments and questions about how and why; which can be totally ok, but also a little annoying if it's more like "why on earth are you so stupid you're trying to do anything in C++" (no one said exactly that, it's just an example of a not very constructive comment). Like my friend, Anders (not my boyfriend, but my friend who is a boy - haha), said: "With programming you can do everything! (Except for saying out load which language you are using without someone telling you it's wrong.)"
Telling me stuff like "you have to hate yourself for choosing C++" is not exactly helping me (or anyone really), right? I didn't wake up one day and say to my self "hey, I think I want to program C++ for no reason what so ever - just because I enjoy feeling stupid". I need C++. So it's a little bit like telling your kid who is doing his/her algebra homework "you must really enjoy feeling stupid since you're doing this algebra stuff - you should work on statistics instead".
I love getting constructive comments or critique, but some comments are just making me feel more stupid than before (like: not only am I not managing the programming stuff, I'm also an idiot for trying to learn what I am learning...).
So I thought, today I want to give you ten FACTS about experiments and data analysis here at the nuclear physics group in Oslo - which is the main reason why I need any knowledge of programming these days. This is probably the geekiest (and perhaps most "technical") facts post I've had so far...but sometimes you have to be a little geeky, right? 😉
  1. The material we want to study can be almost anything - for example uranium, gold, nickel, molybdenum, iron, dysprosium, thorium or plutonium (these are just some examples of what we have experimented with the last couple of years)
  2. We make a tiny foil - a target - from the material (almost the size of a small coin), and put this inside all of our detectors
  3. There are always at leas two types of detectors for the experiments: Sodium Iodide detectors (they measure gamma rays), and Silicon detectors (they measure particles)
  4. The Sodium Iodide detectors are called CACTUS (cause it really looks like a cactus) <3 
  5. Sometimes we use more detectors than the gamma detectors (CACTUS) and the particle detectors - for example fission detectors (we used that for my uranium experiment, since uranium-233 fissions like crazy 😛 )
  6. To study the nuclei in the material we bombard the target with tiny particles; protons, deuterons (a proton and a neutron), helium-3 (two protons and one neutron), or helium-4 (two protons and two neutrons - same as an alpha particle 😀 )
  7. When a particle hits a nucleus in our target material, the nucleus gets some extra energy (sort of like it gets heated); then a particle goes out (it can be the same that went in, or it can be another one), and the target nucleus cools again, by sending out gamma radiation
  8. The different detectors will detect the different kind of stuff that comes out from the reaction in the target: the gamma detectors detect the gammas, the particle detectors detect the particles (protons, deuterons, helium-3, or alphas), and the fission detectors detect fission - the detection of all these thing are what we talk about as our data
  9. Data from the experiments we are performing in Oslo (like my uranium experiment) is typically 10-100 Giga Bytes - so it's kind of a lot 
  10. To sort all of these data we need codes/programs that go through everything and checks if there for example was a particle and a gamma that came out of the target at the same time, or maybe it was a particle and a gamma and a fission product, and what were the energie
    s of all this; the particles and the gammas - on the lucky side I don't have write theses sorting codes from scratch, on the other side I have to try to understand someone else's code and logic, which is not always very easy (when I don't understand I'm always sure it's because I'm stupid :/ )
- CACTUS <3 -
The sorting codes, and everything else I'm working on is written in C++, and that's the reason why that's the language I'm working on.
Happy Monday to everyone!


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Publisert 9 kommentarer til To program or not to program?
I did not at all get through my TO DO list today, and I hate it...:/ (I didn't even get to start at what I had planned on doing.)
I was supposed to read the two papers I'm co authoring, work on my TEDx talk (for Bergen in just a little more than a week - HELP!), get through some of the emails on my endless unanswered emails list, and try to log into the computer that I used for reactor simulations a couple of years ago, to try to get one of the input files that should be there (I'm pretty sure I don't remember the password anymore 🙁 ).
Instead I ended up spending more or less all of the day "programming" - a.k.a. feeling so incredibly stupid. I really want to learn, and be better, but it's hard...I guess maybe I feel the same way about programming that some people do about math.

Tomorrow I have to be better! Not because it in any way is wrong to spend time on trying to work on my programming skills, but because I have deadlines, and right now there is unfortunately no room for anything else than what HAS to be done... Why does everything take so much time, especially things you need to learn like almost from scratch?!? *frustration*  

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Last night we celebrated science and the Norwegian Research Council's Festaften at Oslo Concert Hall. Here are a couple of pictures taken by Yngve Vogt:
- flirting with the boyfriend - 

- discussing with the professor -