For our next interview, we spoke to Ginevra, a PhD student in plasma physics. Thank you Ginevra for your time! Stay tuned for our next interview!
As an introduction, what is your area of expertise within Physics and what are y
ou currently working on?
The title of my PhD is laser plasma ion acceleration for future medical applications. So the aim of my work is to perform experiments that try and optimise the current state-of-the-art laser plasma ion acceleration techniques and there’s several different approaches to laser plasma acceleration. I’m exploring, in particular, radiation pressure acceleration and lysale acceleration. So I do lots of experiments abroad where we have laser systems capable of delivering the energy required for these schemes. And when I’m at Imperial, I normally perform simulations to inform the experiments. The hope is that at some point we will have a laser at imperial which will be able to also performs some smaller scale experiments, which will then be very valuable for the bigger experiments that we do abroad. But as of now, the laser isn’t quite working yet, so I mainly do simulations and calibration stuff here and then I go abroad into the bigger experiments.
What kickstarted your interest in Physics?
I would say I decided I wanted to study physics when I was probably 16 in high school and I had a very good physics teacher. She took us to the lab and she made us write lab reports after our experiments. And funnily enough, I liked writing lab reports. I was kind of good at it. I suppose I enjoyed that aspect of properly thinking about my results and coming to a conclusion, which is something that we hadn’t done in previous years. That teacher I had when I was 16 or 17 first took us to the lab and that kind of made me veer away from maths and towards physics. Up to that point, I was more of a maths girl. I wanted to do maths because I was on the maths Olympics team and I thought it was like the way to go for me and then I decided I actually really like being in the lab and so that’s probably why I ended up choosing to do a more experimental PhD spend a lot of time in the lab, and that’s my favourite part of my PhD.
When did you decide that you wanted to do a PhD?
That’s kind of difficult to answer because I think part of me always knew that I probably wouldn’t be done with my studies after four years of university because, well, I’m Italian and in Italy university lasts five years and for most people six years because people tend to take a little bit of extra time to finish their bachelor’s degree. Very few people actually finish it in three years, so I kind of always felt like I wanted to take a bit more time to study, even in the UK. I could have gone down the route of doing extra masters, I guess, but when I was in my third year, I did a UROP project here at Imperial with a group my PhD is in now and I just really, really liked the environment and the supervisor. I liked the work that we were doing too. I was already working on particle acceleration with them- laser-plasma particle acceleration and when my supervisor then advertised PhD positions later on in my 4th year, I knew I wanted to apply because I felt like it was a golden opportunity knowing that I already liked the group and knowing I liked the research field. And so I didn’t really think about extra masters. After that point I decided, ok, I’m going to just do this.
What is your favourite part about being a PhD student?
I’ve already said on the academic side, I really enjoy being in the lab. I’m working with my colleagues in the lab so it’s a very collaborative process. I’m hardly ever alone when I’m in the lab. Whereas when you’re doing simulations, it’s just you and your computer screen. But aside from the academic part of things, I am a member of the Imperial swimming team and I was a member during my undergrad. I loved it. I was a competitive swimmer before coming to Imperial, and the fact that staying on as a PhD student allowed me to stay a part of a team and keep competing was one of the factors that made me decide to stay at imperial rather than also looking at other universities for PhDs because I knew that it would be harder for me to join a new swimming team from another university, as opposed to staying on at imperial and already being part of this team. So that was definitely part of my decision making. It’s great that Imperial has so many societies and that you can join as a PhD student and stay part of a student body. I feel like being part of a society allows you to stay more in touch with the undergrads and keep living the university life for a bit longer. And of course, all of the student discounts are great. The fact that you still get all of the student discounts, is a great part of being a PhD student.
Looking back, what advice would you have for your younger self?
I think a lot of the time when I was an undergraduate student, I wondered if I was going to be good enough for a PhD because in my head, PhD students and researchers, needed to be the best of the best. It felt like there were definitely loads and loads of students in my cohort who were a lot smarter than me and getting higher grades, some of them were interested in PhDs, some weren’t. But I sort of always had a tendency to bring myself down and think, oh, they should be doing the PhD, not me, I’m not going to be able to bring as much to a research field as they would. And I mean, I guess that was part of the whole impostor syndrome sort of thing, always wondering, am I actually deserving of this position? Do I really deserve to be at this university? And I would just like to like, say, to my younger self, you don’t need to be a genius. It doesn’t matter if you’re not the top 1% of students. You need to put in the hard work and actually want to do a PhD, be dedicated to the whole four year process and want to really do your project. If you find a project that you really like, which I did, it doesn’t really matter if you’re not super, super, super smart. If you like it and you put passion into it, it’s going to work out. And so far I’ve not been stumped by any issues with my intellect, like it’s always just putting in extra work.