PGR Open day and a trip to Keele for Bioreactors course

I didn’t blog last week as I was quite busy, trying to fit Christmas shopping and preparing for the trip to Keele. In addition, I got a new phone so I had to set everything up, so I was quite busy and worried that I might not have time. Then, once I got to Keele I was very busy with the course so I got carried away.

Never mind, two weeks ago University of Manchester had Postgraduate research open day, where I was representing CDT in Regenerative medicine. Thank you for everyone who showed up and I hope I managed to help out. Please feel free to email me through “contact me” tab and I will answer all your questions. Also If you look at my earlier blogs you will find more details about CDT.

So, the trip to Keele. I wouldn’t say that it was extremely useful to me at least not at the moment. I had an experiment in progress, so it was a bit hard to find someone who could maintain it while I’m away. I would have preferred it to be in the first half of the year when we had lectures rather than now. Overall the course was ok, the food on the first evening was terrible. It was ok during lunch, but for dinner we were offered few very bad quality sandwiches so me and few other people decided to go elsewhere. Plus, the bar was where they served dinner was full, so there was no space for us to sit down. The first evening we went to Keele observatory which was quite cool, even though I was petrified to go there. We had to go through a pitch black forest to get to the observatory and I’m very scared of the dark. I survived but it was a challenge. Also on the second day of our stay we had a gala ball. We didn’t expect it will be fancy but it was, so most of us were dressed very casually while the majority of people got changed into proper attire. It was awkward for a bit to say the least but its turned out to be ok. After having a few glasses of wine, we went to the local pub as I stayed nearby and I stayed there until 1:30. Had a really good time but I was quite rough the following day. Also on the last day we had to present a bioreactor that we have created within groups during day 2… I’m sure there were people who genuinely enjoyed it, but in my group most people just wanted it to be done with. Overall the trip was fine, it gave us time to get back together and spend good time which I enjoyed a lot.

Now back to Uni life and I need to sort out my cells. They are not happy on my scaffold. In addition, I am doing quite a bit of teaching so every day I am busy from 8:00 until 16:00 at the very least. On top of that I should work on my continuation report. :) Let’s see how much progress I will make until next Sunday. :)