Not long ago, we found ourselves at the pub the Optimist asking ourselves: why the hell did we ever decide to pursue a career in science? A few drinks in, we realized that we would not be doing relevant science if it was easy. Moreover, in any other job we would probably be bored. To be able to survive our PhD – in a healthy mental condition – we realized we had to change our mindset. We need to learn how to deal with failure, how to be patient and how to create a healthy work-life balance. In order to bring optimism back for ourselves and our fellow PhD students, we came up with the idea for this interactive journal by PhD students for PhD students.

Our goal is to become healthy scientists that are hardworking but relaxed, ambitious but sharing, and confident but humble. We are convinced that the best way to achieve this is by sharing our struggles and by seeing the humor in it. But that is not enough. We believe the efficiency of science can be improved. The scientific method has proven very successful over the last decades. Nothing we write down here will change this. However, we would like to step away from the idea that the current way of doing science is the only way and encourage constructive discussions. Therefore, in every edition we will focus on a topic that merits some thought.

The optimist founders,

Matthias Koch, Donya Pakravan & Joni Vanneste