My Graduate Symposium went well. Turned out that the poster presentation was on Friday, so I could go to my hospital appointment after all ( Read more... )

Viva went swimmingly. The examiners had already decided that my upgrade report was good enough to pass, so it was an hour and a half of how to improve it before the final thesis and thoughts about what the rest of my PhD research should look like. Nice and relaxed ( Read more... )

So, tomorrow I have the viva (oral examination) for my upgrade report, which I am looking forward to about as much as anyone with anxiety would ( Read more... )

Woo. I feel clever. I worked out that a certain molecule had to be put together in cells by polyketide synthesis. And the mechanism I sketched the other day appears to be basically correct, except I didn't know about a particular gene carrying out selective reductions ( Read more... )

Still trying not to beat myself up. The problem of the last two days has been stupid biochemistry textbooks ( Read more... )

I have been quite spectacularly busy the past few days. Have been to the Paralympics twice, about which I will write more later. (Though I shall note that Richard & I were at the Athletics event described in section "You can come second and set a new world record", and had to puzzle out how that was possible ( Read more... )

Those of you who were watching my journal last week would be forgiven for worrying that I had been horribly maimed or murdered by my research report, since I never got back to livejournal to tell you that I'd survived. Actually, no death or serious injury occurred, except to my stack of spoons, which went so badly into overdraft that it took almost ( Read more... )

I don't even know how many hours I've spent in the past day trying to figure out how many data files I have. You'd have thought it'd be easy. Count up the number of filled lines in the spreadsheet. Easy ( Read more... )

Yesterday, when I went to bed, it was grey and drizzling, and I thought "hooray, that's my birthday rain". I've had less than 10 dry birthdays in 36 years. There's an actual reason for it, too, but I can't share it with you because it's from an old copy of The Times and they now want a login for it - even though it's from before they started ( Read more... )

I am "okay". Magically started feeling better about a month ago, and have been working steadily on my PhD research ever since - but I am still buried up to my eyebrows in work and sinking.

I have a deadline of 6th July for my next report due in to the Graduate Committee, with ideally about 3 months of work to do between now and then. It's okay - ( Read more... )