How to Pronounce “Kyi”

• I prefer my last name be pronounced like “key,” instead of the way it should be pronounced in Burmese. As Burmese is a tonal language, a different pronounciation of a word can completely change the meaning. In the case of my last name, this mispronounciation is not so flattering, as explained here

Professional Materials

• I use this Github pages template for my website
• I use this LaTeX template for my CV

PhDing in Germany

• I get asked often about what it’s like to do a PhD in Germany. Unfortunately I don’t have the capacity to do 1:1 calls for each request (unless you’ve got an offer here), but this blog post gives a good overview, and I would say my experience at MPI-SP is similar

Learning German

• If you’re moving to Germany, forget what you’ve been told about how everyone speaks English and you don’t need any German. You need German to live here comfortably. I have okay-ish German, but am definitely not fluent (I would put myself at the A2/B1 level). The summer before moving to Bochum, I did a Lingoda Sprint (and I got my money back!). This intensive course, combined with living in Germany for the past 4 years has helped me get to an okay-ish level of German. However, I work in a fully English-speaking environment and have an international group of friends and colleagues, so is it admittedly difficult to become fluent. Your institute or university will usually offer some free language courses, but these are not enough and sometimes coincide with work time, so I went the self-learning route:
• Other German-learning resources I found helpful (with content that is interesting, i,e., not stuff for children)
  • Easy German YouTube channel
  • I tried out Babbel’s live classes for 3 months since it’s a good deal. However, as there was no impending doom of losing my money if I missed a class, I found it difficult to keep myself accountable to showing up for these classes
  • DW’s slowly spoken news
  • Just doing normal life things in German, like buying/selling things on eBay Kleinanzeigen (AKA the German version of Kijiji, which is the Canadian version of Craigslist), asking for help at a store, listening to the inevitable Deutsche Bahn train announcements announcing a delay or cancellation, and doing stuff related to your hobbies in German can help you learn the language for that specific context

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