Start my Phd

Just waiting for my own faculty to send me the enrolment instructions, so in fact I think I’ll chase them up myself next week.

But crap… all this work last week to get a gene knock-down and I think I harvested my cells too early! Now I’m reading 48h instead of 24h after transfection. Yeah, I know I should have titrated the time of incubation, but darn it, you can titrate until the cows come home (am already doing the siRNA, number of cells, with serum and without, and the three primary antibodies).

So it’s back to the drawing board this week and just hope that with everything I throw at it that SOMETHING has to work!

• reverse vs. direct transfect (going to get them one way or the other!!)
• try transfecting with double recommended reagent as well as recommended
• harvest at 36h, 48h, and 72h (holy crap is correct!!!)
• widen siRNA titration to get a dilution effect from 10nM-40nM to 1nM-40nM (and cross my fingers?)
• titrate my secondary and housekeeper antibody again (for some reason it is possible to get higher readings with lower dilutions!)

Hope my supervisor doesn’t flip-out :) Getting this to work is supposed to strengthen a grant due in 12 days!

for the uni to decide. Is the suspense really necessary??

Have tentatively started my literature review, which sounds impressive but amounts to little more than having a scratch at mechanisms of resistance to cisplatin (chemotherapeutic drug) and realising that Alice in Wonderland had a walk in the park.

To say that I’m anxious about this and having to balance it with my obligations as being an employee at the same time is an understatement. But there is no doing this any other way when you have a mortgage.

I overthink things, I know…

My boss gave me the agreement to be my supervisor in writing today.

Turns out on top of the other documents that the uni wants my resume, which lists my discontinued PhD. I updated it and attached it… I won’t lie, it’s there in black and white. They might not say anything, but they might ask me about it. We shall see.

Anyway… it’s all in baby. Let the dice lay where they fall…

for my boss to write one sentence to say he’ll be my supervisor, then I’m pretty sure I’m home and hosed and will be enrolled.

I warned him that it’s not too late to pull out… hope he’s not thinking about that seriously!

I had to limit my uni application proposal to 100 words. That’s 100 words to state my research area and its significance, approaches I’m proposing, and background experience and supporting funding. Come on.

Anyway, waiting boss… I hope you’re just busy :)

I need to write a proposal for my PhD application, get my boss’ agreement to be my supervisor in writing, get a copy of my academic transcript (must have left it in a photocopier YEARS ago), and submit the application. Easy.

Switching on the student in me again… let you know how that goes…

Animal experimentation is an absolute deal breaker for me, be it work or study. I refuse to torture an animal for any reason.

So my boss rubbing his hands over a colleague’s animal model that involves creating a permanent open wound using a device implanted in the backs of mice so that you can culture tumours and so on does not impress me.

Chances are we’ll never go down that track, but I’m going to get that in writing if I start this PhD, because I’d sooner cut my arm off than torture mice.

Okay, in a nutshell, I’ve started a PhD before, but I ended up quitting primarily to retain what was left of my mental health, which meant cutting any association with my primary supervisor at all cost.

That decision to quit previously was not an easy one, but a necessary one. My supervisor was to some degree a psychopath who systematically broke people down underneath him (I speak in past tense even though in fact it is still occurring).

It can be hard to explain to someone else the totality of the devastation that is the reality for victims under such people, but I’ve heard a quote that fits it well… it truly is a death by a thousand cuts.

Anyway, that is past. Presently I seem to have a great opportunity to do my PhD in my current job that is too good to pass up.

However… there are cons I’m trying to reach past…

• my primary supervisor-to-be boss is only about 30-60% research and seems capable but more enthusiastic about conferences and meetings than the actual research... that’s practically guaranteeing some banging of one’s head against a wall. I need a co-supervisor that I have good access to and resembles nothing of a psychopath!

• my place of work is about 100 min from home, which adds up to just over 3h of commuting every day. That’s a HECK of a disadvantage I can’t get around because there is no way no how we’re selling our home to move closer to the city I hate, not to mention to choose to live beyond our means. I plan to be organised, prepared to start work even earlier than 7:30am every day and to leave for home at 3:30pm every day to keep my sanity. You can have set lab-hours if you’re organised, but my boss will have to recognise this. That seems to be an effort for him considering his combined family salary and home in a very exclusive Sydney suburb.

• I’ve got to get fit and healthy again to give this all I’ve got… totally achievable, but bloody hard to do with little to no support.

• Possibility of resurfacing what was messed up by the psychopath supervisor. Even a year after that period the odd thing could randomly touch upon a patch of mentally thin skin and totally catch me by surprise by scratching right through it. It’s horrible to be vulnerable to such a totally uncontrollable experience like that, having brought me to tears in front of a couple strangers and the only other person I’ve worked with who I’d describe as a psychopath. That was particularly horrific to me, because by then I knew how dangerous she was, but when she was the charming person she could be I enjoyed talking with her, but that was when something random touched on the experience under the ex-supervisor and the damn tears come out of nowhere. You think you’re past it and that happens… it really does suck.

Anyway… once bitten, twice shy. I want to do this, but I’m desperately trying to make sure it’s not a mistake. I do think I’ll be my boss’ first PhD student. He has had years of medical intern students… that’s gotta count.

So my goal is to get this in motion by January. Have the co-supervisor on board, have the project initially hashed out, hopefully a productive understanding of each others’ responsibilities with my boss… and by February, be enrolled and be unstoppable. This is how I originally envisaged a PhD should start… from getting your feet wet as a Research Assistant and then jumping in the deep end and going for it.

Meantime, I still have my job, which is building up to this. I’m hoping the problems that having been cropping up are going to be banished for good. I hate incompetence. And I have a lot of weight to loose… not like I haven’t tried, but this gives me something to work towards.

Still, not easy signing up for at least three years of insanity…

need to get serious now and start searching for applications!

not done anything on this yet – i have a research idea and possible schools and advisors to talk to but i still need to look for scholarships etc