Hello hello and welcome to the second instalment of being confused with Jean! It has been around a month since my last update and here’s a quick one on how the past month has gone.
PhD life is such a rollercoaster of emotions. Some days I feel like I’m on top of the world and ready to take on academia; some days nothing works out in my experiments. Have I mentioned how my cells are feeling suicidal and dying when they’re not supposed to? I definitely think I’m in the “nothing works” phase of my PhD now. On one hand, I’m getting more used to setbacks like these and they’re more like a funny story to tell but on the other hand, it’s frustrating having experiment after experiment not work without knowing how I can try to prevent the same thing from happening again.
I’m trying to move forward by taking it one day at a time. Experiment didn’t work and I can’t do anything about it at that point? I’ll either work on something else that is relevant to my PhD or call it a day to go to the gym and work some of those frustrations out. This has been really good for progress on my literature report - I managed to write most of the section I was dreading to write within a day because of my failed experiments!
Outside of the PhD, I’ve been keeping busy with lots of activities: helping out at the conference organised by the surgical society, going to a national karate competition, finally getting back to the Karate instructor qualification I’ve neglected, making sure to see my friends, the list goes on. I’m also working on lots of exciting things for AIM UK, which is the non-profit for international medics that I run so there are lots of things to look forward to in the coming months!
It’s absolutely mind blowing that it’s only been two months since I became a PhD candidate, I’ve learnt so much in this short period of time. Just a few more weeks to go before things slow down for Christmas and I will be back soon with more blog posts - until the next update!
Lots of love,
Jean