Trip to Edinburgh, µCT experiment and advice for new applicants
- katephdlife
- Jun 13, 2016
- 3 min read
I haven’t written anything last week as I was ill and I was pretty much in my bed sleeping all the time. It really sucked as the weather was amazing (finally) and I was feeling so down. This all happened after my trip to Scotland for the TransMed conference.
The conference itself was quite interesting, even though they didn’t have a presentations on regenerative medicine topics they had really interesting talks about imaging. I also have done my first poster which you can see in the image attached. The only downside of the first day is the lack of sleep. I guess I am getting old, but I slept 3 hours and by 9pm I was totally knackered. Especially taking into account that I didn’t have any food apart from a bun. Actually in the evening I had to go to the local bar and buy a hamburger with fries as the food during dinner was just awful. Well, I had to go with a vegetarian version as I don’t eat fish or haggis, so I though a vegetarian option is usually ok. Oh dear, I was soo wrong. I pretty much got a bit of grass. It left me with an opinion that they have never cooked vegetarian food before. Also on that day we had a trip to Arthur's seat. If you haven’t been in Edinburgh it’s a huge (well in my opinion) hill. I asked everyone which way we are going (there is a steep and not as steep ways) and I was reassured that we will go the easy route. No we didn’t, it was crazy I am not really good with cardio stuff so it was a killer for me. Plus the road was extremely rocky and my shoes were very flat, so I kept slipping all the time and when you have a huge drop next to you it was kinda scary. So this also helped me to get very tired by the evening. I had to leave the evening party and ceilidh and go to sleep. The next day was also nice, the weather was amazing and we managed to leave a bit earlier to go explore Edinburgh. I am sure that I will come back later as there is so much to see and it’s a beautiful city.
Once I came back, I had to prepare my samples for µCT imaging. It went easier than I though (you can see an image of what my final sample looked like). The yellow tube has a tiny little bit of my sample inside and supposedly I managed to get cells in as they are fluorescent and I could detect it. The imaging itself was not as exciting. The scans revealed a lot of polymer blobs that were produced during electrospinning, thus we need to optimise the fibre. On the positive note me and my classmate (another CDT student) submitted a proposal for beamtime at Diamond and it was accepted, so I am extremely pleased. It can be quite hard especially during the first year of your project.
I promise I'm finishing now. So if you are one of the students who is interesting in our CDT please go to my earlier posts (at the bottom of the page you can go back) and find a post where I have explained everything about CDT and the interview. I think it will be usefull for you. If you don’t find an answer to your question please feel free to contact me through “Contact me tab”. I am very excited when I get email from you guys.
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