If I could start over, what would I do differently?

3 August 2023

Five months left until I want to be finished! 8 months until I have to submit. Here, I will reflect on some of the things I know now that I should have done differently in my research, and things that I will carry with me throughout my career.

First off, coming into a brand new field that I have never studied before, I should not have expected myself to know everything. My supervisors did not expect me to know anything either. I wish that I had asked more questions.

As the pandamic hit us around the start of my PhD, I was out of the lab for a while. This was a great opportunity to read and write - which I did with the review article that we published, in early 2021. However, once we were back in the lab, I spent a lot of time in the lab - sometimes 12 hours a day. I never thought the data I had was good enough, so I kept doing the same experiments hoping to get better data. Maybe this is what everyone experiences, because even Einstein said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results". This famous quote must have been from some of his early experiences. If I could do it all over, I would have accepted my bad results and moved on.

21 Oct 2023

On this day, I have finished writing my thesis and am preparing to send my first draft to my supervisors for review. Additional things that I learned from writing up is that I should've kept a better record of my experiments. Throughout my first year, everything I did, failed. It wasn't until I was writing Chapter 3 of my thesis, that my supervisors made me realise that the "failed work" was actually meaningful. It was a way to justify the change in my starting materials. Thus, Chapter 3 was one of the hardest chapters to write up, not only because it was boring to write about failures, but because I had to scramble through all the computers in the lab to salvage my data. I hope if anyone is reading this, that they realise that all data is valuable and worth storing, or writing up. Trust me, all the work you do earlier on will help you later on.

15 Dec 2023

This is the day that my thesis has gone through one stage of review and is now with a second supervisor. I have mostly finished writing and major edits! Yet, the past two months have been very hard.

In late October, my laptop crashed! Lucky for me, I kept everything on the cloud and was backed up. I ended up disgarding my PC and working off a mac. I redid all my figures on the mac (the figures were much nicer on Prism compared to OriginLab), which took me a very long time. The most annoying part was that whenever I wanted to check some data, I needed to go into work to use the work PC. I did this for a few weeks .... and then I realised that I could install a windows remote desktop to my work computer!

This remote desktop connection saved me so much time and allowed me to do analyses at anytime without spending hours at work. It also gave my mac access to a PC to use the PC analysis softwares. Now, while I did redo all my thesis figures with GraphPad Prism and the figures appeared much nicer, I feel like it was such a waste of time. I now much prefer OriginLab as the storage of data within a single file is much better and easier to access.

I highly recommend connecting to the remote desktop, even at early stages of your PhD. I wish that I did this in my first year!

25 Feb 2024

Yep, it is now February and I still haven't submitted my PhD thesis. The problem isn't with my writing (well it sort of is), it is more with the review process. You see, my thesis is very long. I did waaaaay too much and I don't want to cut it out, either because I think my later works were really interesting. However, if I had just stopped and started writing a year ago, I would've cut out a few chapters and made my life much easier. Maybe I would have finished my PhD sooner?

Therefore, the things that I would've done better is write out as I go. Always think of the manuscript that you will write in the future and give your self time to think about your data at the end of each day and evaluate where it fits in your manuscript.