Hello! I haven’t written a blog post in a little while mainly because I haven’t found much inspiration to do so and also because I had been going through a difficult time at work which made me less inclined to write.

However, recently things have started getting better for me in the lab, mainly due to a surprising change of attitude from my supervisor. Before a few weeks ago, my supervisor was a bit.. demanding? That may be the right word.. another could be mean. However, it seems lately he has realised this isn’t the best attitude to have in order to get good results. By good results I mean reproducible results, not necessarily statistically significant results. It took me a long time after I started my PhD to understand this pretty important distinction. I would leave the lab after a long day of things not showing me the results I expected and getting down about the lack of statistical significance, mainly because I saw my supervisors disappointment each time. Now however, I realise that he wasn’t necessarily disappointed in me but in the results themselves. It wasn’t my technique or lab skills that were the issue, but the original ideas. When I think about it now, I am inclined to feel a bit sorry for my supervisor just because of the insane amount of pressure he must have been under to get published and to progress his career.

So now that he has changed his attitude slightly and is starting to take on board my own suggestions and listening to my point of view we seem to be progressing a lot more smoothly. My results, whilst not groundbreaking by any means, are results. We have a much better relationship and I am a lot happier to go into work in the morning because of it.

Due to my time in the lab running a bit more smoothly, my time out of the lab and not working is also running more smoothly. I even found time to go to my first book club! The book chosen was Radium Girls and honestly I found it so interesting to read and understand more about why health and safety in the lab is so important! Meeting new people was an added bonus, they were super nice! 😊📚

I had a really good day today. 👩‍🔬 It consisted of culturing some cancer cells, using a technique called RNA interference to knockdown my protein of interest and so preparing to check the levels of different signalling pathways in response to this change. It was a pretty busy day overall and so I was pretty happy. For me, there is nothing worse than being at the office with nothing to do in the lab and being stuck reading papers/ writing for my thesis. I much prefer actually DOING the experiments rather than writing about them. I would love to hear what other people are doing in the lab at the moment and also your thoughts on the ‘write up’ side of lab work 🙂

In other news, hope everyone is having a fantastic week… it’s my birthday week!