All entries for Thursday 05 September 2013

Labbing, conferencing, general flapping…..

Hi all,

Where has the time gone?! September already and now I have started to see the adverts for Christmas in the shops argh!

I say this as come October I am in the fourth and final year of my PhD!!!!! My supervisors seem to be happy with how everything is progressing and I think I know things will work out well for this last year, but that doesn't stop me from worrying about it!

I think there is an inherent pressure you put on yourself doing a PhD, as personally, I feel it is my responsibility to get the project successfully completed, so any failure within it is difficult not to take personally and I always feel the need to go that extra bit further as it is my work and so I care deeply about its success.

Time has also flown by since my last blog post as I have been sending lots of e-mails, speaking to lots of sales and technical staff from scientific companies about products for my industrial placement work and attending the Society for General Microbiology's Autumn conference where I presented a poster which you can see at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/lifesci/study/pg/research/currentstudents/lsrgbc/research/conferences/.

Despite the general faff of attending a conference i.e. travel, what to bring etc I really enjoyed the opportunity to visit another university campus and speak to some new people. I also felt good about being able to make more people aware of my research! There are lots of opportunities to attend conferences amd courses as a PhD student, and plenty of travel grants awarded by relevant societies that you can join to cover costs your PhD funding doesn't so I would highly recommend it!

The next few weeks are going to be busy PhD ones! I have some undergraduate demonstrating, another symposium based at Warwick that I am presenting a poster at, a writing course, a Vitae Gradschool, plus my work as an IGGY student mentor in addition to lab work to prepare 400 samples for sequencing and then work in Somerset come November for my industrial placement!

So, right now is both an exciting and nerve-racking time in my PhD! Watch this space for more reports on how things go!

: 05 Sep 2013 15:18 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem