The first publication from my PhD is out

If you are curious, till the 29th of July, this link works to download the article for free: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1nExU3QCo9uPHm

It’s the journal article version of the first chapter of my PhD, and has been lying in the closest for about a year, before I could finally get around to reopen the script and prepare it for publication. Of course this happened when I got unemployed after my first post-doc contract, and found myself with more free time than before. But also I needed this distance from the defense and the writing process that often was more difficult emotionally than it was to actually do the work.

On LinkedIn, you usually have to sell everything as a success story, and I believe there also is one here, but there are other stories as well that should exist in parallel.

About how disorientating the PhD can be and how few resources there are available to support students for example. I spent the second year of my PhD at a new University, where I struggled to integrate into the Department while the expectations of my supervisors slowly increased, but my work stagnated to a point where I was short of quitting. I also struggled with the project, because I felt I was only reading code to address issues that I didn’t care to study. No social justice, no inequalities, and mainly technical discussions about how firms are incentivized to reduce carbon emissions. But it was also hard for me to find my footing in the team, and how to relate with my supervisors. Is a supervisor a boss, a leader, a guide, a mentor, a friend? I couldn’t figure this out back then and started to give away responsibility.

If these struggles had not been perceived and addressed by the only female scholar in the working group, I would have not continued. She restored my confidence and willingness to try in a single 10-minute phone call that might have changed the trajectory of my academic path, and related to this maybe my life in general. She told me: “It’s your PhD. If you don’t like where the project is going, you can change it.”

This fundamentally changed how I saw myself in all of this. How through academia and studying, I can realise myself and my interests. Where one can study things in novel ways that other’s might have not. But also where you fail to see things, and learn something new all the time. But specifically that its ones own story. And while my cv might now look more erratic, I am glad to express myself through the research I am doing. Often making mistakes, and getting stuck in a dead end, but also full of joy.

This is primarily a story of how we grow through care and relationships. I hope, I can give back this gift that I received, when someone was aware of me and my struggles, and decided not to look away.

It still took a while to move on practically, and I had to distance myself from the work of the PhD to process, but today, I am very glad to have worked through this.

The practical story

From a scientific point of view, I arrived at the topic of this article because of the work in the beginning of the PhD that I did not follow up with. While working on the DSK agent-based, integrated assessment model, and trying to model industry dynamics of decarbonisation, I tried to find data and estimations of the differences between firms regarding their carbon intensity within industries to base my modelling on. Yet, I couldn’t find much.

How different/similar are firms that supposedly produce the same things in terms of emissions?

I started from this question, and was so lucky that my friend Julian Tiedke pointed out to me that I maybe could try to use data from the Portuguese Statistical Institute which he worked with for other purposes, to investigate this question. He was so kind to share his knowledge about the basic structure of the data, and share some codes to construct the SCIE data, and we had a beautiful month in Napoli working side by side.

Now, I am glad the article was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. And I would like to give a shoutout to all the invisible and unpayed work the reviewers put into this article. In two rounds of review, they pointed out weaknesses in the framing, questioned the robustness, and followed up on the points they raised before.

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