It’s time
All of a sudden we’re halfway through 2024. I got it in my head to start writing a blog over Christmas last year, and that feels like it was just yesterday. Now, I have to put further writing here on hold, along with a bunch of other distractions, as I knuckle down and finally try to bang out my PhD thesis and find a job! So this will be my last post for possibly quite some time.
I started this PhD journey in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. I chose the MRC Precision Medicine programme because it, unlike many PhD programmes in the UK, included a substantial academic coursework component. The ambition was that more than just being a lab rat for four years, I’d be able to branch out and learn new things during my time. I had already been working on the bench more or less full time for 5 years by that point, and felt like I wanted some new challenges, and to stretch my brain in some different ways. Once my coursework fully finished in early 2023, it wasn’t long till I started getting that itch again. I did some personal projects, an internship, and some paid work in AI data labelling (which turned out to be a bit of a grind actually) while trying to round out my PhD. It’s kept me very busy.
I certainly feel like I’ve learned a bunch in these last 4 years. I discovered a passion for programming and data analysis that I long suspected I might have, but never had the confidence to pursue. It feels nice to be mostly bottlenecked by my own ability to think about problems, rather than the growth kinetics of various cancer cell lines, or reagent procurement lead times. I spent the final year of my PhD out of the lab entirely, initially developing software to facilitate a new kind of meta-analysis involving genome wide datasets, and then actually using it!
Time will tell how succesful I’ve been with my work. Going over all my data now, I’d like to think there’s been a nice progression and story that has emerged. But we’ll find out what my examiners think in a few months. I’m a little nervous and a little excited. Let’s see!