27 and no PhD *sob*

I have been literally up to my eyes with work in the last fortnight, and this looks set to continue for the foreseeable future. And for most part it’s not even anything wonderful to report. Just a whole lot of frustration in trying to get everything analysed correctly and most appropriately.

A lot of my source of exasperation comes from the dataset that had been made available to us, and because this is a collaborative project that several groups are working on, I am obliged to use this set of data.

Unfortunately, for the analyses that I am carrying out, it requires several steps of formatting, which is hampered by the un-uniformity of the data source. It is not easy trying to automated processes when the data comes in several forms, all collectively put together. There isn’t even a pattern of the different forms, and such randomness is really quite a curse.

As a result, I had to put in more hours of manual checks, and this is tiring me out when I have some 13K genes to go through. Urggggh…

I don’t even know if I’ll ever have time to keep up this blog properly, with some quality posts. I also dislike posting too much things just randomly without an ounce of interest to anyone. So should I continue blogging here, or let the blog die?

A new week, a new task list to tackle, although not all items are new of course. A week in research can really seem repetitive week after week, but that’s the nature of things until it’s submitted as a paper for publication and be accepted into a journal.

• Analysis of possel for BGP genes
• Reading : 8 SNP papers and 2 genome papers
• Preparing research presentation for next week
• Preparing journal club presentation in a fortnight

Personal life wise, things are going to look a bit dead beat for this week, since I’ve taken it very easy last weekend, what with visitor and all. This week would be to make up for the time lost. But I’m also going to check out this dance class on Thursday evening with my friends. I hope that’ll be good!

I have a journal club to prepare for a couple of weeks’ time, and I guess it could be handy to write a guide on preparing for a journal club presentation. Or at least, this is what I do about it.

Selection of journal : I tend to choose a journal which is related to my work, but still contain plenty of information that would be of interest to everyone else in my lab. Such as methods or statistics that would be useful to most of my colleagues.

Informing others : well, this is obvious. I normally send an internal email with the article in PDF so everyone can at the very least have a quick look through, without having to go through the trouble of searching and downloading the paper again.

Preparing presentation :  give a background to the paper, look into the methods that were used, summarising the main findings and discuss the authors’ conclusion. I try to use mainly the graphs/tables etc in the paper as a mean of presenting the results, as oppose to wordy descriptions.

Discussion and critiques : just because something has been published, it doesn’t mean it’s flawless. With the group, we have Q&As to try to dissect the analysis and the data/result validity, and how the method would have worked in a different projects, how adaptations can be made, how statistics can be more appropriately interpretated, etc.