Starting my first ever post with “Easter break” and “holiday” is risky as these words are usually banned from the PhD vocabulary, but bear with me…
First thing first, my project focus is on the regulatory mediators of inflammation. Their characterization and quantification is a first step in order to identify surgery patients with a high-risk of post-operative complications. As this project combines at the same time work in the lab (like sample preparation and acquisition) and on the computer (data analysis and processing), it’s fairly easy to change your focus depending on the equipment availability or your inspiration.
It’s quite common for the most computational intensive tasks to take hours or even days, but luckily you don’t always have to go back to the SAF building to collect the result, study them and send another batch of calculations during the weekend. Imperial College makes working from home simple, home at the end of the bus line or home in another time zone.
Being able to remotely access your desktop and not having to maintain an identical copy of your files on your underpowered laptop is a blessing (and that’s without taking into account all the software you just wouldn’t have access to). With your computer set up and put to sleep, your desktop is only 30 seconds away. The only mishap I experienced during Easter break was when calculations crashed on the third day, it quickly turned out that the computer had decided to go back to sleep. To prevent that from happening you have to opt out of the automatic power saving scheme.
As the computational intensive work was done on my Imperial computer, I could resort to taking a small netbook to manage it remotely during the break – the upshot of that being a lighter than usual bag.
This was a necessity as I was a man on a mission.
Since last Christmas, my fellow Stratigrads have developed a fair appreciation for Swiss chocolate. We would have a get-together once a day or so around our coffee pot, some tea and chocolates, discussing our last reading or ideas related to our respective projects. In order to keep this good vibe going, I was tasked to max out my 20kg hold luggage allowance with 5kg of chocolate.
Arnaud