Finally a day on site! Well, here I am, almost on time after parking my car and walked to Mediciina buidling and yes, I found the correct room for the meeting. Opened the door and prepered to apologize for being late… but 4 persons in a whole lecture hall. Understood immediately that of course also this meeting was organized virtually because of the corona situation. Well, nice to be here anyways. And where am I? Today is My UTUGS event, intended for all new doctoral candidates in University of Turku Graduate School.

This day has been full of information about the graduate school studies and services that university offers to all doctoral candidates. I learned about finance possibilities, mentoring programme, HR, different tools like Kanban in project management etc. And actually from the IT services presentation I found out that it is possible to create a personal blog using UTU platforms! And that is why I finally decided to make this happen after several months of considering of writing a blog about my PhD process.

So I could start from the beginning.. I started my journey in University of Turku initially a long time ago in the faculty of economics, worked in mobile phone industry for years and to make the long story short – then decided to change a career and started to study in Master Degree programme in Human Neuroscience fall 2018 and graduated as M.Sc last spring. What would my future look like with these two totally different degrees? Shall I try to find my place in private sector, third sector or shall I continue my studies in university? These questions in mind I found a doctoral candidate and project worker fixed-term position in public health department starting already in February 2020.

So here I was, decided to accept the challenge and started to work for new LEO (Living Environment and Obesity) project in Public Health Department, created the research plan in one month and applied to Doctoral Programme in Clinical Research and got approved in May 2020.

In this blog, I will write about my journey towards PhD!