How are you dealing with the home-office situation?

Interview with Philipp Koch.

Philipp, you are in your fourth year as a PhD student in the Bioprocesses Group of Sven Panke. Many also know you as a member of the “D-BSSE meets industry” initiative. What is your set-up for the home office?

I have a separate room where I sit and do my home-office work. Usually, I spent about 90% of my time on lab works and about 10% on computational work, which I sometimes did in the home office. But now it is a 100% that I sit in front of my laptop in this separate room at home – but, it’s okay, it works. I had to re-organise my work schedule. For me personally it was okay because I can now focus on writing up my first story as a paper – it is not as bad as it looked in the beginning.

What do you see as most challenging with respect to home office?

What I experience is that I tend to not be focussed for a long time here at home. Also when I speak to my colleagues: people work a lot but they are less productive. I see that as a danger: that you work a lot and spend a lot of time in front of the computer but you don’t get a lot of work done. The most difficult thing is that the difference between weekends and the weekdays is blended, and you don’t get a relief at the weekends, that is what I am missing.

Is there anything else you are missing?

I am an experimental worker. So, I miss the routines in the lab. Usually, you plan the experiments, you do the experiments in the lab and then you analyse the data. This big chunk in the middle of my work-flow is basically missing. Now, when I write up stuff and analyse the data, I might realise that some experiments did not work out, and it is quite frustrating not to be able to go back to the lab to repeat those. Also, the things that usually annoy you in the lab, the simple and repetitive work … I somehow miss them now.

How do you stay in touch with your group?

We have our weekly group meetings over Zoom. Then we also have sub-group meetings with our direct supervisors, mentors or team members in smaller groups. And then, some of us created this 10AM-coffee break where we meet virtually every day and discuss ideas and see how we are all doing.

To the D-BSSE, you offer weekly TABATA trainings, that is a physical cardio-vascular work-out. The last two times, about 30-40 participants joined the sweaty trainings. Has physical exercising become an even more important part of your daily routine?

Not really, I used to try doing some sports at least every day. Now I also try to exercise every day, but of course I fail from time to time, like probably all of us. We do this Tabata training with support of the VMB {scientific staff association} which also financially supports us. There is a core of people who joins this training every week (for now more than 2 years) in the Clara-Schulhaus here in Basel. And, since two weeks, we meet virtually on Zoom – every Tuesday at 6:30PM. It is no replacement for jogging because you don’t spend time at the fresh air. But it is a high-pulse, very intensive and efficient training – and I invite all of you, also the PIs, to try it out. It also takes place today and we will send a reminder email later today. So, you are all welcome to join!


Thank you very much, Philipp, and: keep the pulse at high speed!