With June in sight, our focus shifts once again to the bi-annual funders meeting.
But this time with a major twist…
It won’t take place in London but in Orleans!
As always, the week leading to the meeting is a major presentation training and slide extravaganza
As you can imagine we have enough to keep us busy, not like we have to write our late stage report…
Oh, wait…
It is quite obvious from previous posts that our Early Stage Assessment (aka 9 month review) has been the center of our attention for the last couple of months.
My fellow STRATiGRADs summed it up well: writing the report made us look back at the rollercoaster of a year we all went through, from progresses, successes and more interestingly challenges we faced, and then we could more clearly plan the course of the next 2+ years. It was also helpful to get outside views on our projects and to have a good refresh on how to present our results.
Following my post on our hot beverage habits, I will digress this time about our work environment and another mandatory tricks we use to get on with our work…
We are all seated in the SAF building’s open area: 5 levels of metal, glass, wooden desks and labs.
I can remember our Research Proposal, the Stratigrad meeting and even posters and conferences for some of us, but 9 months seems like a lot!
Happily things got faster in the last 3 months as we got more experienced with NMR and MassSpec sample acquisition, data preprocessing and other software needed for our respective projects: the data started flowing in.
More data meant also more and more time in front of the computer to make sense of it, and that’s when our secret weapon came handy…
Tea or Coffee 1 or 5 First thing in the morning before any verbal communication or Last trick to get a bit more out of the day
we all have our much needed styles and habits…
Recently a very good friend about to start his PhD told me how optimistic he is, but said it might change in a year and cited this PhDcomic which – in truth – is spot on.
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.