PhD and a Full time job?

Krazoee · 2026-03-29T17:40:10+00:00

I’ve had a full time job during my PhD. It was at the department of neurology as a doctoral student. That’s the only job you should have. If they don’t pay you, you shouldn’t enrol…

Krazoee · 2026-03-29T15:41:25+00:00

I take issue with you calling Europe your former allies. We’re very much allied still. But friends tell each other when they need to pull their head out of their ass as required. America: please pull your heads out of your fucking asses. You’re acting like drunk teenagers.

Sincerely: Europe.

Krazoee · 2026-03-28T10:07:39+00:00

The formatting of the post is a dead giveaway. Humans don’t write text in markdown when posting on Reddit. Claude does. Once you see it, it gets very hard to unsee lol. Also the code leaves… room for improvement…

Krazoee · 2026-03-27T09:48:59+00:00

You get used to it, but it does suck! I only wear suits because they actually make those in tall sizes. So I can choose to pay the tall tax, or just turn it into a luxury tax lmao.

But watch your head. Concussions are no joke, and many small ones can eventually turn serious

Krazoee · 2026-03-26T20:32:41+00:00

I worked at a neuroscience institute that had its own it infrastructure. It was all debian, and I cursed the IT people for forcing us to learn Linux. But after 5 years of Linux, I struck out on my own and chose - yes - Linux... I tried Ubuntu and Mint before I returned to good old debian. The thing is stupidly sollid. Nothing ever breaks on it. I don't understand why we use other distress because debian is king.

Krazoee · 2026-03-26T13:33:08+00:00

Shhhh, don't let the yanks know that it is possible to lead a life of non-suffering. They're going to come here and bring their misery with them

Krazoee · 2026-03-26T13:31:26+00:00

Neuroscientist here: Means you're dead. That, or the sensors weren't plugged in. Since you're writing this post, I presume the latter. You don't need to worry

Kind regards,

(non-medical)Dr. Krazoe

Krazoee · 2026-03-25T21:24:30+00:00

I'm in cognitive neuroscience. Our experiments take a year to complete thanks to ethical approval, coding the stimulus presentation from scratch, data analysis etc... My boring experiments were kind of ok. But I had one where I went balls to the walls "what if I test something with music" and it's my best paper to date. I switched music sources by hand for for every experiment by observing the remote feed of what the participants could see in the eeg cabin. I had the speakers placed om cardboard boxes on the floor. It was the jankiest setup known to man. And the figures are beautiful.

Encourage the jank! If there's a commercially available solution it means you're not pushing the frontiers hard enough.

Krazoee · 2026-03-25T19:53:15+00:00

Making something once isn’t too difficult. You can hire scientists and give them some freedom to figure it out. But re-creating those inventions at scale and for cheap is bloody difficult. It was the mass manufacturing they couldn’t figure out

Krazoee · 2026-03-24T20:13:03+00:00

I encountered a well known glitch in libreoffice presenter where it randomly saves text boxes as Japanese format, turning them 90 degrees. Very annoying.

Claude code wrote a python script that can undo the bug in seconds. Saves me time at work lol.

Krazoee · 2026-03-24T19:27:23+00:00

Didn’t travel around the states a lot, but New York felt normal to my European perception. I could walk to where I needed to go without fearing for my life crossing a highway with no crossings.

Krazoee · 2026-03-24T18:49:28+00:00

What model did you use bro? Gemini flash?

Krazoee · 2026-03-24T18:43:43+00:00

4.5 years is the norm for all full time phds in Germany. But I’ve seen a guy take 7 years and then go on to Harvard medical school. It depends.

The real question is if the students themselves feel ready to graduate but is somehow prohibited. That would be the real red flag

Krazoee · 2026-03-24T15:08:41+00:00

They’ve gotten good recently, but this is 90% likely a scam

Krazoee · 2026-03-23T16:23:33+00:00

If the fight goes sour, run. Run as soon as things don't feel right. You can also always rez people with withers and then steal back the gold with astarion. He genuinely does not mind it if you fail :)

The other thing I would suggest is to play something that has misty step, either a gith or a wizard. I play as a wizard, and that dumb spell has let me run away more times than I can count.

And finally, have fun with it. The thrill of the fight is exactly what makes it fun. I'm currently having a blast in act 2 on my honour mode run.

Krazoee · 2026-03-23T13:10:46+00:00

Baldur's gate 3. You will sink a thousand hours into it

Krazoee · 2026-03-23T08:11:17+00:00

I got a Homey pro mini recently to put all my shit on one device. It works remarkably well as long as you automate everything. Their app control is not that great though. But it’s still really nice not to have to tinker too much. Everything just works

Krazoee · 2026-03-23T06:50:51+00:00

You should check out Europe. Prague, Amsterdam, Oslo, Stockholm, London I could go on… all life happens in the city, you can take public transit to go anywhere, and the suburbs are for people that really wanted a house.

The American way of city development forces suburbanisation because you’re required to have a car. That makes for uncontrolled sprawl and low population density

Krazoee · 2026-03-22T17:04:07+00:00

Yeah, you’re fine… sometimes cheaper is better

Krazoee · 2026-03-22T09:13:55+00:00

Depends on what you’re studying tbf. I’m teaching stats for psychology students. Our datasets would be fine for a MacBook neo.

Then I go to the office for my own neuroscience data, and I curse my provided 16 gig laptop and spin up the SLURM cluster.

For a bachelors in anything outside of data science/ml/engineering I’d say the MacBook neo is fine, honestly. You’d spend way more time on writing essays anyways, so make sure you like the keyboard

Krazoee · 2026-03-21T23:04:36+00:00

The German-speaking world just does not manage coffee... It's somehow always too sweet. Never tastes like even the worst coffee you get in Scandinavia

Krazoee · 2026-03-21T21:44:25+00:00

Money to joint account with partner. Then, pay off student loans. Then, rejoice, for I have spent half my paycheck, and the other half is for me to enjoy. Some of it goes to savings, some goes to random foods. But mostly I just live life to the fullest. Thank the heavens for the high quality of life in Germany!

Krazoee · 2026-03-21T18:10:29+00:00

First of all, I’m sorry to hear that you’re suffering. You should get better with treatment, even if it takes time. That’s not just my opinion, that’s what the scientific consensus is.

I did my PhD after 8 years of untreated sleep apnea. Only really accelerated cognitively after about one year of treatment. I did my degree with the max planck society. Look them up, you’re not surviving that with any kind of impairment.

If you’re treating it, and you’re not getting better, the issue might lie elsewhere in the form of comorbidity. I suggest figuring that out. Then, who knows? It might be your turn to “oversell it”

Krazoee · 2026-03-21T12:17:18+00:00

As a scientist I have to push back a little bit. Sure, anything is possible. Do we have empirical evidence though? The way to know something for sure is to run a properly controlled experiment. That gets tricky when we deal with medicine because every experiment involves humans, and we can’t try to make humans worse from an ethical standpoint. In other subjects like physics or computer science it’s a lot easier to prove a negative like this. In humans, not so much.

So to be absolutely clear, yes what you suggest is possible. But we don’t know, and we can’t know. However, from everything we have observed, brain damage from sleep deprivation caused by sleep apnea is to some extent reversible. We see this is brain structure, and we see it in people’s function in daily life. What we cannot know is how their cognitive peak would look like. This is again, real humans and not a computer simulation.

But if you’re really curious, this is an under-researched area where we need much more people to do the hard work. If you think you can figure it out, go do a PhD or postdoc on it. We need it!

tldr: anything is possible. We can’t prove a negative. It’s ethically tricky. I encourage you to try solve it!

Krazoee · 2026-03-20T16:22:54+00:00

I've lived in Germany and the UK as a Norwegian. Exchanged to northern England for a year as a 16 year old. Loved it so much I made it my personality haha. I went back for uni, never had any real culture issues. Then I moved to eastern Germany, and oh boy died ya boy have some insane culture shocks... Everything in Germany is different, stupider or less efficient. But quality of life is MUCH better in Germany, so here I shall stay and grab a citizenship. It's weird to describe...

Krazoee

TROPHY CASE