As you might have noticed, so far my project wasn’t going very smoothly. But to be fair, I am very hard to please person, thus even if I had results that haven’t been outstanding but just good I wouldn’t be happy. I also spoke to a number of other PhD students on CDT and most of them seem to be in a similar situation to me. Just a quick recap of what’s been going on: cells wouldn’t survive on my fibres, no matter what I do to them to make them more favourable for attachment. One of my supervisors who designed these fibres in the first place left University of Manchester, hence is no longer my supervisor. My another supervisor got pregnant and was on maternity leave most of my 2nd year. Now she is back but only works part-time. Thus I have only one supervisor who has only general knowledge about the cells. To be fair it wouldn’t matter that she is away if there were other people in a group with whom I can discuss project plans. At the moment I am most senior in a group and my she has 3 other PhD students who were also seeking her attention, hence consult me from time to time. So, how this has changed now?
I had a meeting with my main supervisor and I told him about my anxiety. He basically suggested having an extra person on my supervisory team. The professor who is helping me now is head of CDT, so she is responsible for me in a way and also she has experience in what I am working in. My co-supervisor was very angry at me for some time, but we are in a quite friendly relationship so she couldn’t be angry for too long. In a way, I felt bad about initiating all these changes as I made her look like she can’t supervise me, but on the other hand, I want to have a good PhD with publications and I have to take action if I feel like it’s not going in a right direction. Anyway, now I have meetings every 3 months or so with my co-supervisor and 2 professors. The first and second were very stressful, on the first one I didn’t have much data and was very nervous. It lasted 2 hours. The second one was stressful as I had to do a lot of experiments, but luckily it all worked. And we found some interesting patterns. My tube-like structures are now forming nicely (see image) and we noticed increased osteogenesis when cells are cultured in media preconditioned with my material. This week I'll have a meeting with my co-supervisor to discuss further steps, but we are thinking to analyse overall gene expression profile in preconditioned media and not. I am much calmer at the moment but still very busy, but mostly with writing though.