Reflecting on and reviewing my second year of PhD life

This is my last week in the lab of 2018. It’s only really four days because we’re having our group’s Christmas party on Friday (laser quest and pub lunch) and then I’m at a conference on Monday, before taking the rest of the week off before Christmas.

Towards the end of First Year I wrote this post about how I thought my first year had gone and I listed 5 things I wanted to change. In this post I’m going to see how I did with those goals and create 5 new goals for Third Year.

1. Read more papers: I managed this one quite well. In First Year, I sporadically printed and read papers but this year I got organised and set up an RSS feed, and have been pretty good at checking in with it most days – perhaps a little too often with my “inbox zero” tendencies. I use Mendeley to save anything I come across that might be useful for my project. I tried #365papers and failed miserably though, partly due to me losing the spreadsheet I was keeping track of papers on in an IT nightmare, but also me just not getting into a habit.
2. Make more compounds: I certainly achieved this one. First Year involved trying a lot of new chemistry and at the start of this year I optimised a lot of that chemistry, making it far easier to get final compounds out. For example, one set of molecules I made last year took 8-9 separate reactions to get there and now, with a small change to the chemical structure that I’ve learned doesn’t kill the activity of the drug in most cases, I can get to those compounds in 2-3 steps.
3. Be more selective in the seminars I attend: In First Year, I felt I had to go to every single seminar to widen my knowledge. But as you specialise, you learn what interests you and what a good use of your time is. I still go to the odd seminar outside of my research area so I’m not in too much of a rabbit hole, but I certainly feel like I’ve been using my time a bit better when it comes to seminars.
4. Attend more conferences: Having only been to one conference in First Year, I went to a few in 2018 – and still have one to go next week! I started the year by attending the Genome Stability Network Meeting in Cambridge in January; in March I went to the RSC-BMCS Mastering MedChem conference at University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, then RSC/SCI Kinase 2018 in May, again in Cambridge, and still have the RSC Biotechnology Group Chemical Tools in Systems Biology in London a week from today.
5. Use this blog more: This one I’ve technically achieved in the last month or so. Most of the year I found myself “procrasti-blogging” – sporadically blogging – if I was taking part in a science writing course where an assignment involved writing a blog or the Google Doodle of the day was linked to chemistry. Now I’m making a concerted effort to post regularly here and also on my dedicated Instagram account.

I think I’ve done quite well in meeting all of those goals. They were fairly realistic goals, without quantification. Now here are my goals for Third Year:

1. Keep using this blog: Weekly blog posts, a couple of Instagram stories/posts a week. Over Christmas, I’m going to make a longer term plan for content and schedule as many posts as I can, so it doesn’t take up too much of my time during term-time.
2. Get the desk/bench balance right: I continue to struggle with staying at my desk more often than being in the lab. Often I choose reading, agonising over lab books/write-ups and writing off lab tasks to “tomorrow” that could be done today rather than making stuff in the lab. If anyone has any tips about this please let me know in the comments.
3. Get something published: I have something to show for my research and I really want to get some of it published in a medicinal journal, to show alongside my thesis at the end of my PhD. I’m waiting for some long-promised data from a collaborator which will help supplement my work but I’ve agreed with my supervisor that in February I need to start writing papers for publication without that research.
4. Speak at a conference: Similar to the above, I have a sufficient story to tell and I would love to give a talk, just once, about my research at a conference rather than just standing beside a research poster at said conferences where people may or may not come over to hear about it. I’d also like to go to a conference outside of the UK because travel is one of the perks of being in research.
5. Finish the practical side of the project well: I plan to spend another year in the lab before writing up. I have until March 2020 technically, but I’m leaving those three months as a “backstop” of sorts – #relevant. In my head, I’d like to get to 100 final compounds for my thesis (I’m about two thirds of the way there so it seems tangible) and I’d also like to spend some time in the biology labs my groups have, testing some of those compounds.

Hopefully this time next year I’ll be writing a similar post about how well I did in achieving my third year goals. It’s crazy it’s got to my last year in the lab already!

Fiona Scott (@fi0n0) is a PhD researcher at Sussex Drug Discovery Centre. This story was published on December 10, 2018 on Fiona’s blog, ‘The Chemistry Of A Phd’ (available here) and has been republished here with her permission.