It turns out that people think I'm a little crazy for leaving the US and coming to Australia for my PhD program, so I'll try my best to do a little explaining.
First of all, I just want to clarify that prior to this experience coming up, no, it was not my lifelong dream to travel to Australia for a PhD program. I actually wasn't intending to begin my PhD this early at all. When I graduated from UC Davis with my Bachelor's degree, I was planning to take a gap year (or two) to get some "life" experience while completing an online Master's program in Applied Statistics. I was going to spend some time volunteering, maybe get a part time job working with animals - either in a shelter or veterinary setting doing behavior-related work.
Then one day, as I was perusing Facebook, I spied a link to this fantastic opportunity:
Having recently returned from an amazing week studying scent-detection in Sweden at HundCampus, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to continue learning about scent detection - plus I would get to work with Dr. Pauleen Bennett??? This could not be more perfect.
I feel incredibly lucky to have been chosen as one of Pauleen's graduate students. I am following in the footsteps of some incredible canine researchers, including Mia Cobb of Do You Believe in Dog? and co-emcee of last year's SPARCS Conference (I went to the first one in 2013 - and started this blog shortly after!). In the end, I'm not actually on the scholarship advertised above, since La Trobe generously offered me a full-funded PhD program from the university's regular scholarship pool. Lucky me!
So the simple answer to why I'm spending three years in The Middle of Nowhere, Australia? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (or once every couple lifetimes for that matter), and I'm so glad I was essentially in the right place at the right time to be on this fantastic adventure!
And for anybody wondering where Bendigo actually is, look at the very bottom, on the right side, just above Melbourne:
Having recently returned from an amazing week studying scent-detection in Sweden at HundCampus, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to continue learning about scent detection - plus I would get to work with Dr. Pauleen Bennett??? This could not be more perfect.
I feel incredibly lucky to have been chosen as one of Pauleen's graduate students. I am following in the footsteps of some incredible canine researchers, including Mia Cobb of Do You Believe in Dog? and co-emcee of last year's SPARCS Conference (I went to the first one in 2013 - and started this blog shortly after!). In the end, I'm not actually on the scholarship advertised above, since La Trobe generously offered me a full-funded PhD program from the university's regular scholarship pool. Lucky me!
So the simple answer to why I'm spending three years in The Middle of Nowhere, Australia? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (or once every couple lifetimes for that matter), and I'm so glad I was essentially in the right place at the right time to be on this fantastic adventure!
And for anybody wondering where Bendigo actually is, look at the very bottom, on the right side, just above Melbourne:
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| Thanks to this webpage for the nice map that actually includes Bendigo :) |
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