One of the things I missed during my search for a perfect PhD-position in the Netherlands was that I always felt like there was no choice for me….actually I did not really have a choice…and that goes for almost everybody I know… It is rather that you just stay at the department where you have performed you Master internship  than you do your PhD or that you just apply for an available position due to an ad placed by the department on the Nature.jobs or Academic.transfer website…

I would describe the postdoc retreat ‘Put your career in perspective’ in Heeze as the best three days I spent on shaping my career path. As a postdoc I was at a point in my career where I had a pretty good idea about science, but none about working outside the academia.

At the end of my PhD-thesis I was convinced to stay in science and move forward on the same subject. I even submitted a grant proposal and the first review looked promising, so I was quite sure I could stay in the same lab and continue what I was doing. I even made plans to move to Rotterdam (Erasmus MC). And there was the news, the proposal was not good enough for funding and the plans I made all went out the window.

Somehow, since the retreat, I find myself more aware of everything that I do during the day. Mostly work things, but also in my free time. It’s as if I’m trying to make myself realize which of the things that I do all day I actually like, which things I don’t mind doing and which things I don’t like or even dislike so much that they put me in a bad mood.

The science-annex of the newspaper, popular science magazines and books have always been things I enjoyed reading. I love to see how journalists are able to explain difficult science in a simple way, and would like to be able to do this as well and become a journalist one day. But I know that there are only very few people who can make science writing into a paid job, and I personally didn’t think I’m a good writer - so I always just left the writing to others…

I promised to tell you about my preparations for San Diego, so here is the visa application part. My most useful tip here is: prepare in time. With sufficient time, everything will be ok. In the end. In my case, I not only had to arrange all the documents for myself, but also for my wife and baby son. This doesn't change which documents you have to fill out, but it does increase the number of them and the amount of supporting documentation you need to collect. And that takes time. A lot.

Today was the first working day after the retreat. Hectic Monday, the morning is filled with meetings, a student in America wants me to supervise her literary report, one of the research technicians wants to know where we think we are going to put the new multiplex bead analysis device, another wants me to label all the pipettes in our lab so we don’t lose a pipette every month or so.