The last time I wrote I was about to spend a month at the Research complex at Harwell. Well, I spent there only two weeks. As I thought the experiments didn’t go as planned. To be honest at the beginning it looked quite promising and we found neat correlation between cell infiltration and type of scaffold we used. However when tried to do it in a more reproducible way that we add cells right before we image, we found that there is no correlation whatsoever. I didn’t lose all my hope and I tried to stay positive. On the second week I prepared all my samples and added cells to have a look whether they will still be there three days after. Well, they weren’t there. Firstly some of my scaffolds fell apart but also none of the scaffold had any alive cells. It was quite miserable day just going through each of my samples and realising that nothing worked. I had my hopes up until the very last sample after which I kind of broke down I think. It’s not like anything changed its just quite depressing and I struggle to keep my blogs motivating. I don’t want to discourage anyone as I think PhD is a great thing to do, but it’s also so hard mentally especially when you have negative data. I never took it seriously when people were saying that PhD students have higher chances of depression but now I see why. Imagine hoping to get good data each day within 4 year and keep getting bad results but you ned to push through and at the end defend your project in front of a panel. At some point you start to suffer from imposter syndrome when you think you are not good enough to even attempt to do it but also you start to think you are wasting money that was given to you. Despite this you try to stay motivated and carry on working. I start to understand better why lots of PhD students like to drink :D Anyway, few next updates that I intend to write soon will be possibly more optimistic and I will cover my progress on my side project for which I was awarded a grant and my wedding update.