The end is nigh

!Warning! This post features academic content and is not purely about travel…

Reality check: Today is the first day where I truly feel like my placement is nearing its end. Lindy is leaving for a weeklong conference in Budapest tomorrow (it’s alright for some) so, in lieu of our usual Thursday morning team meeting, we each met her individually. The purpose of our chat was to run through a few ideas for my next series of experiments, in which I’ll attempt to optimise a therapeutic protocol of red light irradation to minimise oxidative stress in slices of rat spinal cord (oo-er), but we wound up talking about how I’ll be spending the remainder of my time in EaRN. Up until this point, it had felt like I was chugging along at my own pace with plenty of time to go and no real end in sight, but Lindy pointed out the startling fact that I’m 28 weeks down with just 12 to go; 11 if you count my week’s holiday in Sydney next month. Anyway, the take home message was this: It’s time to really crack on with things.

It’s the norm for Bath students that the collection of results, data analysis and general writing up of the report takes about a month, which means I should ideally have all my practical work done by the end of April. Judging by my current workload, it’s definitely a fair chunk of hard graft, but I think it’s just about achievable. I’ll be very glad to see the back of hours spent pipetting in the tissue culture hood or chopping up bits of baby rat in a room stinking of cadavers, I can tell you that much! However, I’m the type of person who gets sick and tired of doing the same thing for too long and writing isn’t my favourite task at the best of times, so chances are the report will have driven me insane within a couple of weeks and I’ll be pining for some lab work. I shall have to remember to leave my desk and get out in the fresh air at regular intervals, otherwise I’ll come home looking like a luminous white, square-eyed cave dweller.

As far as the report itself goes, I’ve already made a start in the form of my literature review, which acts as the introduction. You can read it here; I make no promises of it being a thrilling read, but it may interest some of you to know what all this nonsense I go on about is really about. That just leaves 40 odd pages of abstract, hypotheses, methods, results, discussion and acknowledgements to compile… Oh wow. Add to that a poster on my research for inspection on the department’s poster day and I am well and truly freaking out. Let the countdown begin: 80 days until home!