RANT, 2nd office space. My continuation report progress

So finally, I got an office space at Henry Moseley. I have been waiting for it since September. However, the sooner it got to me actually getting one, the more I realized that I might not need it actually. So for those who don’t know, at Henry Moseley we have extremely powerful computers, so I thought if I will have one I won’t need to come very early to get a free pc at the computer cluster. But as time went by, I realized that those office computers are not that powerful at all and you still need to use a computer cluster if you want to have a powerful computer. I discussed it with my co-supervisors, but they still kind of insisted that I should try and get a space. Another thing why I didn’t really want this space is the people around there are not extremely friendly, I would say. Hey I’m Russian, so I will be blunt. In the Mill we have a very nice group and you can always chat to people and have some fun while at Henry Moseley no one really talks to each other. So it feels rather “cold” in there… Local director of Henry Mosley wants me to be in that office all the time unless I’m in the lab, which as you can guess I’m not a big fan of (I mean being in that office)... Anyway, this week I got the space… Well I should say a table. They even didn’t have a chair for me and obviously no computer or even a safe storage space. So to get a computer I would need to request it from Uni (if they allow having two PC’s per person) and wait for 6 weeks until I get one. So I will discuss this situation again with my co-supervisor and I will try to tell them that I’d rather use a computer cluster. I just feel that it’s a bit disrespectful to give me someone’s dirty table with no chair… I’d rather stay where I currently am.

Enough of ranting, let’s talk about the continuation report. It’s a bit weird as some of my cohort classmates have a deadline in June, while me with a bunch of other guys have it in February. Anyway, I started to feel the pressure, as February is approaching rather fast and I don’t think I have good results. Well I have results, but they are more about me testing and figuring out the best conditions, which counts but I would like to show that stuff works not that I’m trying to get it to work. I guess I should chill, it’s all part of PhD. Also I’m not feeling prepared for my viva at all. Everyone with whom I spoke says that on your first viva your project and you will be completely destroyed. Despite that, most people like it as for them it’s sort of a challenge even though you fail. I don’t mean fail your viva, but that you won’t be able to answer all the questions and might feel like a complete idiot. They say that you need to know all authors of the literature and obviously all the literature about your topic to the smallest detail. Which is quite stressful for me. I am terrible with names, just awful, so I have no ideas how I will remember any authors at all. I guess I will have to write them down and take a list of them with me into my viva. Also I don’t feel like I have read enough papers, I’m constantly busy at Uni, so during normal working hours I don’t have time for it, so I guess I need to develop a new habit to read one paper a day. If you are just starting your PhD I would highly recommend developing this habit.

My next week will be quite busy too. I will start preconditioning experiment, as my cells are not very happy on my scaffolds, so I will run a small study. Also I have a lot of meeting and “as always” :D I will update you next week.

P.S. the “as always” was a reference to Vsauce