Essays

I was never afraid travelling. Now I'm pretty nervous when I travel alone. But I don't think that's such a bad thing.

Vrouwendag is een goed bedoeld gebaar, maar ik denk dat het meer kwaad doet dan goed. Kunnen we het niet afschaffen?

My grandma told me that we always come back to the same hobbies. Stubborn teen that I was, I didn't believe her, but I do now.

I used to dream about storage space, even before I had to worry about it. Those dreams were magical and fun, so I want to revisit them. Take a stroll down memory lane with me!

Younger people are more tech-savvy in general. Soon, I will have to relinquish my computer nerd status to my younger siblings with a superior understanding of modern-day technology. But helping my brother set up his custom pc made me realise this thought might be wrong. Are we the tech support generation – for the generations before and after?

After years of studying, I have started feeling pretty confident in my machine learning abilities. But my collaboration with SRON brings me face to face with my lack of experience with satellite imagery. Let’s wind back to your student days with me, and dive into the world of the pure joy of learning new things!

First of all: I’m a gym addict. The type of gym that looks like a big garage, has a lot of free weights and free live entertainment in the form of elite athletes (Sportja Leiden, if you’re interested ;) ). When we have to run during a class, that usually raises collective moans.

Last weekend the clock went one hour back: a nasty surprise. I was already going to bed on the late side before my gym session the next day. Switching to summer time meant another hour would be taken off my night. In the end, it messed up my sleep for an entire week.

Something a friend from uni told me last week over coffee got me thinking

The impostor syndrome - every PhD student gets it at some point, or so I’m told. For me, it’s hard to disentangle from my own perfectionism: I’m tempted to think whatever I do is not good enough, regardless of how good I think I am at something compared to other people.