A Fork in the Road

Almost to the day six years ago, I published the very first article on this website. I wrote about how I was somewhere between Düsseldorf Airport and Stockholm Arlanda as the article went online.¹ I compared the situation to movies, where there are typically two plot points at which the protagonist makes a big, fateful move – “crossing the threshold” in the beginning of the story, and “the road back” towards the end.

I am quite positive that I did not think this metaphor entirely through, but as I am writing these lines, it feels like I did in fact reach the latter story point. I am now on the road back. Over the summer, I received an offer for a full, three-year Postdoc at GESIS in Cologne.² And I will probably again have to move with a single suitcase. (Because I still don’t own a car and have to get my things back from Norrköping somehow. Six years is a long time to collect a cornucopia of small things with big sentimental values that I simply can’t leave behind.)

It feels a bit weird. On the one hand, I have been in Sweden for six years, and a lot of things have happened in that time. On the other hand, it feels merely like an extended field trip. Emotionally, it feels a lot like the latter, albeit I rationally know that reality is the former. I have started and finished a PhD. I have made my first publications, built international networks, found a niche that I didn’t expect to find myself in, and I grew as a person. I made a lot of new friends and found amazing colleagues, and realized anew every day why I love what I am doing. Indeed, looking back at the past six years, I frequently encounter memories I can’t believe happened less than six years ago. Surely, a lot has happened.

Take this blog, for example. It started as a simple “I’m going to force myself to produce at least a page of text a week to get into the habit of writing.” And I persisted. One thing I just realized while scrolling through the pages is how consistent I was. True, my first few articles all were only about 600 words in length, but after a few weeks, this number increased to something between 1,500 and 2,500 words and remained at that level for almost six years. Yes, there is the odd article in there with 10,000 words (such as my wonderfully ridiculous Monad explainer), but I was surprised to find that the “reading time” indicator on all pages always announces a value between 10 and 15 minutes.³ And indeed, for most articles I do aim for the 2,000 words mark. Which means: goal achieved. In fact, I got so comfortable in writing that I now almost naturally find topics that are both of interest to me and to you,⁴ and writing these articles takes almost no time at all anymore. Judging by the page metrics, the blog has attracted a surprisingly large recurrent audience — so I guess thank you for your loyalty and for sticking around!

And finally, this blog has realized my hopes that the actual writing part was the least of my concerns. For my dissertation, I wrote four papers. And it took a total of four weeks to write everything down. Whenever I felt the urge to write one of my papers, I would sit down on a Monday morning, and just start writing. By Friday afternoon, the entire first draft was done. Including plots, tables, references, and chapter headings. Now, don’t get me wrong: none of these first drafts survived as-is. They all turned into Theseus’ papers and have been heavily modified since. But completely marching through the dreaded “empty page” problem in one week has eliminated so many problems that I could have had. Instead of wondering how I could start the next paragraph, I just wrote it. This way, I could focus on the actual issues: is the research question clearly formulated? Do I have a sane methods section? Do the plots convey the information they need? And are there some big mistakes in the code? The result: one paper is already out for publication, one is under review, and a third one will be soon.

But writing a PhD is just one part of the equation. No matter how important publications are for advancing one’s academic career, if you neglect the other parts, you both (a) miss out on the fun and (b) will have a harder time advancing in the future. Academia is an inherently social experience,⁵ and so I tried to make the most of the limited time I had.⁶ I visited many conferences (to the detriment of my supervisor) to try to broaden my perspective as much as possible. I served as program chair for various conferences and co-organized three here in Norrköping. I became a member of a select set of associations for my field, and think that I have started forming an understanding of the internal logics of my field.

And there were some unexpected, but exciting opportunities in there, too: I got a publication in a top-tier IEEE conference and got to experience how the computer scientists do things on their side of the aisle; I got invited a few times to talk on topics I am an expert on, like LLMs for social science or my open source engagement; I visited North America for the first time in my life (two times the U.S., one time Canada); and feel like I couldn’t have made much more out of my PhD years than I did. One thing I didn’t do, although I wanted to, was a research stay at another university, but that never materialized for various personal and professional reasons. But apart from that, I believe that I made the most out of it, and I am thankful for this opportunity through and through.

Some of my hopes from that first article didn’t fully come true, however. First, while the anticipated time to finish one’s PhD in Sweden is four years, it actually took me five years, due to the various assignments I had. Among other things, I co-organized a series of Winter and Summer Schools together with my supervisor, Jacob Habinek,⁷ and I did a lot of teaching in the institutes’ master program in Computational Social Sciences, which collectively extended my grace period by a year. I successfully defended about a year ago.

Then, the job market hit me. With the current U.S. government complimentingthrowing academics out of the country, and making Europeans reconsider going there in the first place, the European academic market is plenty overheated. I started applying to Postdoc positions in April 2025, and wrote dozens of applications, to no avail. As funding ran out, I was lucky that a friend of the institute in a neighboring department had both the need for my skills and the funds to extend my stay. After many more unsuccessful applications, I finally got lucky and saw a call that essentially looked like a carbon copy of my CV. I am absolutely excited about this project, and will be telling you more about it and my role in it in due time.

But it is important to recognize that I have been very lucky since my defense. I have heard that one commonly competes with about 50 to 100 other applicants on the average Postdoc position. A former student of our program at one point told me about a PhD position they applied to, which received 460 applications. I further applied to a few assistant professor positions where I suddenly competed with 300 to 400 much, much more qualified people. In short: life certainly doesn’t get easier. I feel, however, that it helps me appreciate the opportunities I get.

I will be leaving Sweden both happy and sad. On the one hand, it has become home for me. Six years of living in a country leaves its marks. I have met awesome people here, and made experiences that will last a lifetime. I will miss them, and the places I connect with them. I will miss the institute, my completely overengineered desk setup, and the five minutes of commute I had to the office every morning. I will miss my way to work across the Motala river, and around the university library. And I will miss many of the quirks of Swedish culture, the subtle distinctions where you realize that Germany and Sweden, while almost disturbingly similar, are two separate countries.

But I will also be happy to leave Sweden behind. After all, I miss Cologne, and many of my friends whom I have barely seen in the past six years. And I feel that switching institutions is still an important part of one’s academic career. I still can barely believe that I made it into one of the most famous research institutions in Germany. And then in Cologne! And with an exciting project! That all of these stars would align so perfectly is hard to fathom.

This brings me to one final point. I have started writing here as a means to an end, and that end is now achieved. I have thought about this on and off for the past year: Should I stay or should I go? The answer is clear, I believe: I’m going to stay. (Or, rather, keep writing.) These articles have transcended their original purpose. I am no longer writing because I need to get my writing skills up to speed. I am writing because there is so much I want to say that won’t make a paper. The next five articles are already in the pipeline, and I’m sure once I get through those, there are five other topics I wish to share with you. So for as long as it makes sense, I will continue. Writing is just such a great outlet; a hobby, if you will.⁸

In the common weeks, you can expect a series of additional articles in which I will try to summarize my experiences from 5 years of doing a PhD with one year in retrospect. I already outlined a lot of my experiences a year ago, but I did not really touch upon the less shiny parts of doing a PhD. But I do believe that those are also important. After all, I made a promise six years ago to try to help other prospective PhD students get their bearings for the journey ahead. Finally, I will share some other insights on six years of this blog, and maybe a few personal anecdotes of life in Sweden before I finally return home.

One road may come to an end, but the next one could not be more exciting.

Onward!