Welcome to the second instalment of ‘a day in the life’. Previously, I mentioned that my days as a PhD student are very varied, and as this last post was so popular, I thought I’d show you another variation of my PhD days.
Around 9.30 am, Arrive at University – I always start my day if I can with some morning admin. I catch up with emails, any science news and new papers out, and also make a plan for the day. I sometimes have a cup of tea or some breakfast at this time too.
10.30 am, Cell Culture – at the moment, the majority of my work involves using and growing cells. Today I was checking all of my cells and feeding them, as well as passaging some.
11.30 am, Lab, PCR Prep – I then went to the lab and prepared a PCR to check the efficiency of some primers/ready for purification before sending a sample off for sequencing.
12.00 pm, Lab, PCR – Once I had done this, I loaded it onto the thermo cycler machine in another lab and left this run for about 2 hours before I could analyse the reaction.
12.30 pm, Lunch – I won’t lie to you, this is my favourite part of my working day…
1.30 pm, Desk – after lunch I went back to my desk for a bit and looked through some papers and did some research into how I could improve some of my troublesome experiments.
2.00 pm, Lab – my PCR is about done now, so I go back to the other lab to take my samples out of the machine and pop them into the fridge in my lab (there is LOTS of running between labs) while I’m making an agarose gel (takes about 20 mins including setting time).
Once this is done, I load my samples onto my gel, and put them into an electrophoresis tank. I then set the voltage and time (45 mins) and let the samples run. For anyone who does not know what this is, my samples will move through the gel following the electric current and will then allow me to check if I’m getting the product that I want.
3.00 pm, Microscope – while my samples are running in the electrophoresis tank, I use this time to check my cells again (in yet another lab). However this time, I am checking the cells that I have transfected with siRNA (temporarily stopping the expression of a gene) with a fluorescence microscope to see if they are glowing. They were glowing (if they weren’t, I would know that something is wrong), so I could continue with my other set of experiments over the next week.
3.45 pm, Back to my Lab - Finally I can check to see whether my PCR has worked (many experiments are multi step processes). I go to another lab to visualise my gel under a UV light and generate an image of my PCR products (samples).
4.00 pm, Office – now that my lab work is done for the day, I go back to my office and write up the work I’ve done that day and analyse any lab results. I also know that tomorrow I want to come in and start lab work straight away, so I plan tomorrows experiments and calculations. After I did this, I go back to researching papers and forums about why some of my experiments are not working well (lots of PhD work involves digging around for clues and problem solving).
5.30 pm, Home Time! - At the very end of the day, just before packing up to go home, I usually go on my research/blog twitter account to catch up and engage with other science communication bloggers, and to see what the general science community is up to. I also end up doing this on my commute home.
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