A bit of depression, 1st year viva and another beamtime

Sorry I have been missing lately. To be honest I felt under a lot of pressure so I completely forgot about the blog. Last few weeks, I was preparing for my 1st year transfer viva, as well as to our beamtime. To make it even better my co-supervisor asked me to prepare all the documentation for the beamtime and chase everyone to get descriptions of samples. It was all more or less ok until, I found out that my dad is not very well. He is all fine at the moment but I am going home in a month to see him. All this together as well as trying to meet everyone from last beamtime and show them their data kind of broke me down a bit. This was the first time I felt that PhD is actually very stressful and mentally challenging. I didn’t tell anyone about my dad so everyone was continuously asking if I am ok or not which got tiring as well. Anyway, now since I have passed my 1st year viva, had a few drinks and prepared almost everything for the beamtime I am feeling much better. There is still some pressure as I need to finalise prep and then analyse other data and write it up for publishing by the end of May but, I am feeling more relaxed.

(Picture shows my viva set-up)

Anyway, I wanted to tell you a bit about 1st year viva. I “luckily” wasn’t scared at all, I had way too much stress in the past few weeks so viva felt like nothing too scary. I came into an office and gave my 20-min presentation after which I had one hour of questions. To be honest since one of my co-supervisors is on maternity leave I found it quite useful as I could get an advice of some people who understand cell biology. I wouldn’t say the questions they were asking were that hard but I would recommend to know the project in depth. Some questions I couldn’t answer but I still tried to make an educated guess, but first acknowledging that I don’t know the exact answer. So even if you won’t know something it’s better to say it and give your understanding that pretend to know an answer and make yourself look like a fool if it’s not correct. Also, I was really worried that I will get a lot of questions about electrospinning and chemistry of my material, as I spent some time preparing it and one of the examiners was working on quite similar material. Luckily, he didn’t ask me that many questions. Maybe my presentation was good or maybe he was just nice to me. Anyway, I am happy that it is finished. Now I have to make sure my two undergraduate students finish their projects successfully.