It has been a while since my last "actual blog post". I really am not good about these things haha. Anyways, I am undecided about how to judge these last two weeks. But let me take a step back and talk about what happened.
Previous Posts in this Series:
School is picking up. My workload is increasing and I had to start studying a bit more. Luckily we ran out of liquid nitrogen this week, so all my research is currently on hold. We need liquid nitrogen to cool down the detector in our IR spectrometer. Without cooling the spectrometer the signal would be too weak and our data would not be good. Furthermore, the detectors could take some damage so that would not be good. This gives me some time to prepare for school. It is my last semester, and I am already counting the days (76 days left...)
While the end is in sight, I do not know where I will go from there. Within the next few weeks I should hear back from the dental school I interviewed at, which is in Aberdeen, Scotland. Dentistry sounds cool, but in the end it may be boring. The pay would be amazing, and there would be job opportunities left and right, but I feel like work would be too repetitive.
I am hoping to get cleared by the University of Queensland in Brisbane to apply to their PhD program. My interview with my potential supervisor went well, but I still need to make sure that I check all the boxes of their graduate school and then compete against other applicants.
At the end of March I will hear back from master programs. I applied to a school in Lund, Sweden, and to a European Joint Master in Surface, Electro, Radiation and Photochemistry (SERP), where I would spend a semester in Paris, one in Genoa Italy, one in Porto Portugal and then my last one anywhere in a partnerlab. This sounds like an awesome program.
There are some tough choices ahead.
Steemit has been going insanely well. I am getting close to 400 followers and past the halfway mark on my way to 1000SP without getting any delegations. The support I have been getting from the steemstem community has been tremendous and I feel priviliged to get almost all my research posts upvoted by steemstem and curie. I am also very happy that I was able to help 
I have discovered Zappl. Since I cannot post research posts every day anymore, I will probably use Zappl a bit more (to keep getting daily rewards). I posted the first #science Zapp, and I am hoping that more people will pick up on that. In addition I have started using minnowbooster. The last week I was delegating SP to them to receive daily SBD rewards. However, it is not really worth it to be honest. So I started to automate my upvotes and I will get the first results this weekend. I have also started to "sell" my upvotes on minnowbooster. When my VP is over 75 at the end of the day my upvote is sold and I receive 85% of the vote. It is a nice little extra you can make overnight.
I really enjoy Steemit and I am really happy that I have been somewhat succesful. While I will not get rich, it is a nice side-income. Additionally, I have to read a lot of research articles, which is beneficial. I am making money by learning, and I think this is probably the most amazing thing that happened in a while.
My goal for the next few weeks is to reach 1000SP and to get 500 followers.
This should conclude today´s blog post. I will keep you posted if something cool happens. You all should check out Zappl. We need more people posting under the science tag.
