Currently I’m in Rutherford Appleton Laboratory that is located in Harwell research campus. I’ll stay here for 2 weeks and then in March I will come back for 2 more weeks. It will be busy but hopefully productive as I’m getting really worried about my data. We are planning to use Light sheet microscope from Leica to look at the fibres that I make and my vascularisation efficiency. I was really upset and anxious last week about my project. I have a year and 7 months (roughly) left until I need to complete my PhD project and finish all the write-up. (on CDT we are not allowed to take extensions) But so far I only have roughly one chapter of my thesis and it requires more results to fill in the gaps. The plan was to have 4 chapters and to be honest the stage where I am now with my project Is really far from what we aimed to do. I am still working on basic experiments which are crucial but not as exciting as other stuff. To be honest Im not sure if I will even have time to do what we planned. The idea was to use iPSCs and possibly do some in vivo studies on chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) of fertilised chicken eggs. This basically involves having a fertilised egg in which we would create a hole until the membrane and place our material. If material is good you will quickly see blood vessel ingrowth. There are a lot of other cool things you can do. Anyway, had a chat with my supervisor and she also said that she is worried about my project, which made me even more worried. Im not starting to thing that I should have waited to have my wedding a bit longer as it means I will have to take quite a lot of time off uni to do all sorts of prep. Well its all scheduled now so not much can be changed, I’ll have to work with what I have and do all what I could to get good data.
Everyone with whom I spoke says that this is normal process of PhD and most people get all of their data in the last year, but you know, you always hope for the best but it not always works out the way you want it.