Whoa, Torben really raised the bar for the scientific rigor and quality of this blog. A bar that I will happily swoop well under without it even grazing the top of my head.
The last couple of months have largely focused around preparing for our Early Stage Assessments, which entails a short report and a viva consolidating what we have been doing since we started and what our plans for the next two years are. Sounds fun right? It’s actually not. It is however a good opportunity to think about what has worked, what hasn’t and the direction our research is going in. We also need to know what we are talking about, which you wouldn’t think would be a problem…
But then again every time someone asks me how NMR works, this is immediately what comes into my head:
The power and usefulness of magnets. Fortunately I haven’t taken too much more scientific advice on board from Breaking Bad, because that would likely lead to some seriously questionable life choices.
It really is difficult to believe we have nearly been here for a year now. A lot has changed, and not just that fact that I feel like I am constantly broke (thanks London). We have all settled in to the work patterns that work for us, struggling to find decent work-life balances, while the pitfalls of research and academia are becoming second nature. The new set of students will be starting pretty soon, and I would like to think we have all learnt enough since we got here to be at least not totally useless if they need help at any point.
Now I really need to start generating and processing data! Various projects that have been brewing for a while are now all coming to a head to start new and interesting experiments, which is pretty exciting. So I should probably get back to all that!
Until next time.
P.S. I was right, I do still have a beard. Not everything changes.