Science by day, bowling by night

Author: Leoniek Magazine

An interview with first-year PhD- student Daan Iglesias van Montfort, about how to keep your head clear in the academic rat race. 

Whilst doing his Bachelor’s and Master’s in biomedical sciences, Daan Iglesias van Montfort worked part-time as a bartender and team captain at the Bison Bowling Utrecht. He learned how to draft a beer, throw a strike with his eyes closed and lead a team through a 10-hour Friday night horror shift, but most importantly he learned how to maintain a healthy work-life balance. As he started his PhD this August, he tells us how he plans to implement his old work ethic into his new.  

Daan’s research group is specialized in the unravelling of highly fundamental processes in the first embryonic developmental steps of model organisms such as the c. elegans. As a fresh first-year he will learn a quantity of new methods and he needs to adapt quick. A day at the lab could be fully packed with just culture and microscopy sessions. Let alone all the data analysis, reading, writing, meetings and supervision of master-students. This could be overwhelming he says. Especially when competition, time-pressure and individuality dominates the field of work.  

Daan is aware of this playing on the background, but he plans to not let it get too far and tells us that the experience he gained from his part-time job will help him with this: “Having worked with various people, makes it easier for me to reach out to others […] Especially in social settings, being assertive, working hard, getting the job done together, stuff like that.”  

One precaution Daan intends to take is to not work during the weekends or when at home. He says a common mistake young researchers make is to not have a strict line between worktime and freetime. It is of great importance to recharge and to turn your ‘research head’ off occasionally. He realized that his part-time job was his escape to turn his brain off during his Bachelor’s and Master’s. The trick is to distract yourself after a day of work, rather than just do nothing he says. In that way your mind will not subconsciously wander back to work-related stuff. Yet another lesson Daan learned from his part-time job.  

If he could do another part-time job alongside, he would, but that is of course out of the question when doing a fulltime PhD. How he will blow off steam now, he cannot say yet. It may be in cooking; it may be in finding another hobby. But either way, he is grateful for the things he learned and the person he became because of his time at the bowling alley