I’m Lindsey, a final year PhD student due to finish this September. Or January. Who knows any more, the goalpost keeps moving.
It’s been 3.5 years of several astronomical highs (getting voted to do a full conference talk from my poster, reaching the university’s 3-minute thesis competition final, and probably about two times that experiments have worked nicely first time) but more memorably a lot of days spent banging my head against a wall at the general frustrations of academic science.
Spot the difference – 1st year – 3rd year!
Doing a PhD has come with numerous challenges, from dead end hypotheses, to unreproducible results, to insufficient data anxiety. And that’s before the global pandemic. But now I’m embarking on my biggest challenge yet: finishing it. Through this blog, I plan to share my thoughts and experiences as I move from my current stage (still in the lab, as you’ll read in my next post) through to writing, submitting and defending my thesis. I hope that these posts might strike a chord with someone in the same position as me, but if not then it should be a cathartic experience: anything to release the inevitable tension of the next few months.
