Author: qudsia

I have now started my second year of PhD at Åbo Akademi's Physical Chemistry department. I come from Pakistan and my research is on developing good metal oxide layers for use in Perovskite Solar Cells (although how you define good here may be subjective).
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The Finnish Winters

This seems to be the primary ice breaker in Finland: “So, how are you enjoying the Finnish winters?” (It’s even phrased almost the same way). Or may be that was just because I arrived here smack dab in the middle of winters.

Sometimes I laugh it off. Sometimes I just do a general commentary on that day’s weather. And sometimes, I admit to hating it. 

Where I come from, it’s 48-degree-Celsius-in-peak-time-of-summer hot. And snow, that’s fairy dust for us. People revere snow. Of course, we do have snow in some parts of the country, and all trips to these “exotic” regions are planned according to when there’s snow in the forecast or the news.

Apart from these once-in-a-while excursions, we are not adapted to winters that are as frigidly cold as the Finnish ones, or as dark.

Here, there’s more snow in a month than the total I had seen in my life before coming here, so of course after a while, I started suffering from this condition called too-much-snow. But then the days got longer and we moved from snow to slush, and it was all going very well. In fact, it was happening just like I expected it to – except that it snowed in again after some days, and again after some more days, and again.

So may be it was my pride that got hurt (because it didn’t go just as I expected), or my elbow when I slipped on a bad piece of ice, but I cannot say I will have fond memories of my first Finnish winter (which, people tell me was colder in this part of the country than it usually is). May be next year, when I’m more adapted to the cold, and have probably gotten myself into trying something winter-specific.

It’s all good for some time, but man! where is that spring season one of my colleagues promised me was just around the corner?

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The Finnish Doctorate

In the 3 months that I have been involved in a PhD at Åbo Akademi University, I have come to the conclusion that just the act of pursuing a PhD in Finland warrants keeping a blog about it.

Because Finland is right on the opposite end of the spectrum of all cultures I have experienced so far. This inevitably also shows up in how one organization, or one group, does research. I find it quite interesting how these “cultural” differences can dictate how you approach a scientific problem, and how you interact with the system and people around you.

This can make for topics interesting enough to make it worth it to drop the research process once in a while to document the experiences.

But then again, the PhD process itself can be full of ups and downs, and well, blogging is the obvious way to go about it for me.

So here’s to doctoring through a Finnish PhD, and writing about it.