Hello! I’m Kayleigh, one of the new StratiGrad PhD students at Imperial and this is my first post… You’ll have to bear with me as I don’t blog, barely tweet and have only just set up a LinkedIn account. But that’s ok because ‘I wanted a challenge’…she said! I have ventured back into the world of academia after spending three amazing years training to be a Clinical Biochemist at Guy’s & St. Thomas’ Hospital.
I’ve signed up for a three year PhD on the StratiGrad programme trying to identify novel biomarkers of ovarian cancer! That’s the broad title anyway, and I will split my time between a group at the IRDB, that’s Institute of Reproductive Biology at Hammersmith Hospital and here in the CSM – Section of Computational and Systems Medicine at South Kensington. I’d forgotten how bad scientists were with acronyms (so I’ll save you the Google search!)
It’s an exciting topic combining both epigenetics, looking at DNA methylation of certain genes and metabolomics, profiling cancer patient body fluid to detect and quantify metabolites to identify potential biomarkers.
We are now…hang on let’s check my calendar… 9 weeks into the programme and at the moment we are finalising our project plans ready to hand in our research proposals and have just presented our research plans to the Funder’s. It was a long day but very interesting to see what the other StratiGrad students are up to! Lots of our time is taken up with reading research papers and making plans for our own experiments.
Memories of doing my BSc and MSc are resurfacing and I’d forgotten how good I am at procrastination. Sitting down in front of my computer at 9am on a Monday morning with the very best intentions and suddenly it’s 11.15 and you have successfully –
- Checked facebook… Break-ups, make-ups, weddings, birthday’s, weekend shenanigans etc…
- Checked emails… Apply to win a trip to Fiji – Yes that would be nice
- Fantasised about lying on a beach in Fiji with a Pina Colada – oh so nice!
- Thought about what you want for lunch/dinner
- Googled recipe for lunch/dinner
- Made a list to go to the shop to buy ingredients for said lunch/dinner
- Checked bank balance…oh was that wise?
- Checked outlook calendar… ah yes that’s due by the end of the week. Hmm must get on with some work.. and now it’s 11.15… where did the day go??
So here we are 11.15 and I’ve got oh 45 minutes to get work done before I go off for lunch!
As I said, I’m very good at procrastination, but I got through my BSc and MSc because here I am! I’m very much looking forward to getting into the lab and getting started with my research (no time for procrastination here!) obviously once the plan is written and speaking of which, I must crack on!
As a blog is not complete without a picture here is a picture of Pete, Nancy and I having some fun with the camera when taking headshots of ourselves for our student bios!
Until next time…
Kayleigh