11th hour
September 27, 2011 by Steve · 2 Comments
They do say if it wasn’t for the 11th hour nothing would ever get done. 72 hours to submission and I get a re-write dropped on me, oh and some notice that I should expect the worst from the viva as everything I’ve done is rubbish. Well, the latter part I didn’t need to be a professor to know (shame I wasn’t rubbish at saving the lab £5,000 when I fixed the AKTA after GE gave up, or when I did those stochastic simulations for that grant proposal, or the numerous rotation projects I magicked up, or the RT-qPCR machine I got for half price, not to mention moving the lab across the country, ho hum.). 30 hours without rest has resulted in most of it implemented, but the discussion chapter still needs serious re-writing, and all the figures re-drawing. An emergency appeal to the university has resulted in a 7 day extension but with a late submission mark against my name. Not too bothered about that, at this point. A last minute reprieve or just delaying the inevitable? I don’t know. I get a few more hours added to my clock to pluck some more magic out of the air. It wont be corrected, and it wont be pretty.
At least the project has remained consistent to the end.
I’ll be glad to be out of academia, one way or the other.
About Steve
A pitty your PhD ended up such a bad experience for you. I just started my own sysbio PhD at a DTC, hope it will go differently.. I enjoyed reading your blog, hope you still keep posting. Where are you going to from academia?
Hi, thanks for visiting my blog
My experience was shared by a number of others on our DTC unfortunately. Hopefully yours will be better organised and managed. Make sure you keep an eye on 2 things during your Ph.D: 1) Publication; see if you can produce a mini-review from your literature review, and structure your work throughout towards at least one publication. Writing a publication will help enormously towards writing your thesis, as well as your career; writing is a skill as much as doing a western blot, or coding. 2) Keep in mind what kind of job you want at the end, and make sure you develop skills in those areas so that you are employable at the end. I would recommend focusing on either wet skills or dry skills, and just give a passing nod to the minor one to keep the DTC happy (we had to do a combination wet and dry and I got the balance just off to be employed at either). Research and industry projects do not employ people who are good at both, they look for specialist experts and form multi-skilled teams. This is something to consider when you’re skilling up in your Ph.D.
At the moment, I’ve applied for a couple of post-doc positions, but the “systems biology” roles are all looking for mathematicians or statisticians, and bioengineering isn’t happening in the UK. For systems biology. there are no posts requiring skills in life sciences, other than generally knowing they exist. They want mathematicians to build models from data obtained from collaborating wet labs. I’m currently re-skilling in PHP and Python programming while awaiting a viva date, and if I’m fortunate enough to get through, I’ll be looking at freelance web design, or coding jobs so I don’t have to return to factory QC microbiology (my B.Sc training). Our DTC really let the wet lab scientists down in terms of skills and career development, and none of us have jobs at the moment. We’re all frantically re-skilling, after spending 4 years re-skilling. It’s quite frustrating. I would probably recommend sticking to programming, and as much computational work as you can, as the dry scientists are doing pretty well with well paid posts in bioinformatics and modeling. Stochastic simulations and the accompanying statistics are quite popular at the moment too, and worth adding to your CV.
Also remember that conferences are massively important to attend. Focus on networking while you’re there. It’s not about the science, it’s about the contacts you make for post doc positions when you finish. Sell yourself and your science and don’t be a wall flower
That’s my 10p of advice anyway
)) Hope it does go well, I still believe systems biology is a valuable field for the future.