Maybe something that my fellow final year PhD students and I have been discussing lately - it seems as if it's only as we enter our final six months in the lab that we've really started to understand our projects. I've had a few rare flashes of clarity lately, as I've finally caught a glimpse of the direction my work should take, and what experiments I should be planning. Unfortunately, almost immediately these have been followed by another flash - I'm only funded until the end of September, after which I need to beg a friend to take me in off the streets as I write up.
At the moment I'm screening my putative transgenic plants, and systematically going through my seed lines. This is something I should have done about a year ago, if I hadn't been too demoralised by that point. Unfortunately, my past has come back to haunt me, and it's a choice between doing it now or having a big fat blank for the first 18 months of my PhD. It has now joined the long list of experimental work that's jostling for my attention right now. Yesterday I spent four hours sterilising 32 seed lines (only another 72 lines to go!) and two and a half hours today laboriously plating them out. My right thumb will need some time to recover....
My friends and I unanimously agree that if we were to re-start our PhDs now, we would have got to this stage in our work at least a year earlier than it's taken us this time round. But that's the whole point of doing a PhD in the first place - it's a learning curve. The process of doing a PhD means that we get training, not only in experimental technique, but also in the skills of project management and planning, of taking responsibility for a project that is ultimately our own. Sure, it's difficult, and often frustrating - not for nothing do we PhD students kid that we are actually undergoing Permanent head Damage - but then, so is 'real life'.
For the biological and chemical scientists, the UK PhD system is fairly unique in that most of us are expected to be finished and written up in four years maximum. In the US six years is fairly standard, and seven or eight years is not unusual. After all, PhD students are cheap labour, and after the first few years we 'should' be well trained up enough to join the paper-generating machine that is needed to boost their supervisor's PubMed ranking. In one way, I would now welcome the possibility of another six months' funding for my PhD project, as there are so many questions I want to follow up and so little time to do them in. But then, I think it is precisely this tight deadline that has forced me to think about which aspects of the work are most interesting and what I should concentrate on. It's a shame that I didn't reach this stage of clarity, and indeed, maturity, earlier!
P.S. The comic above is from PhD comics. If you haven't heard of them, you're obviously not a PhD student. It took a long time for me to decide which comic strip to use for this post, but I decided this one summed up a PhD the best. Despite my new-found confidence in my work, I have no doubt that I'll be back to my normal stressed self next week.
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Well, lucky you! You still have 6 months to go! I've only just realised how to fix one of my major problems and I've got less than 3 months left!
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