Hi! I am Alice, I am from France and I am starting a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, entitled “Neuro-computational foundations of social norm compliance and violation” at the Paris Brain Institute.

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My academic journey started with a bachelor’s degree in Biology in Sorbonne Université and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, where I also did my master in Biology and specialized during my second year in behavioral and cognitive neurosciences. After completing my masters, I did a 4-month internship in Karolinska Institutet, Sweden during 2022, where I worked for the first time on fMRI data - more specifically, a twin-study studying the heritability of facial emotion recognition. It is during this internship that I talked with my PI and began thinking about applying for PhD positions. The year after, I decided to do a 6-month internship in Japan, at the Riken Center for Brain Science, where I worked on TMS as a way to modulate human subjects’ ability to do mental imagery. My goals with this internship was to learn more about another method used in cognitive neuroscience research, to discover research outside of Europe, and to get as much feedback as I could on the PhD experience by talking to as many people as I could. At the end of this internship, I knew that I wanted to do a PhD and I knew that, even though I liked TMS during my internship, I would prefer to do a PhD using fMRI.

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I started to look for an internship during my 2nd year of my masters in cognitive neuroscience. In France, a lot of 2nd year masters can end up with a PhD (if everything goes well of course), so I wanted to choose my internship extra carefully. I found an offer for an internship in Paris Brain Institute in cognitive neuroscience, working with healthy population and clinical patients. It was already written on the offer that the project could end up in a PhD, including an fMRI study. I had always been advised that when you choose a PhD, what matters first is the supervisor, then after that the method you are going to learn, and finally the project itself. After having my first interview with the supervisor, which I had a good feeling about, I chose to do my internship there. I thought that the method already matched what I wanted to do, and the internship was giving me 5 months to see if we could work well with my supervisor. With my supervisor, we were very clear from the beginning, saying that if everything goes well, we would like to continue for a PhD together.

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As the internship was going really well, we decided to continue with the PhD and started to apply for a PhD grant, in particular to the “doctoral school grant”. This system is a bit specific to France, where the student that already found a Ph.D. subject with a supervisor has to apply for grants to pay for their income. My supervisor, on the other hand, had already applied for several grants for the project itself (to pay for the fMRI, etc.) and he got the money for that.

This “doctoral school grant” involves an application with several steps, including a defense portion where the student presents the PhD subject and the feasibility of it in front of around 20 researchers. This was a very stressful experience, but I did learn a lot during the preparation of this defense and the defense itself. After this, I learnt at the beginning of July that I got the grant and just started my PhD on the 1st of October!