27 and no PhD *sob*

Work has been slow and not quite all that forthcoming. Especially when plagued with a dataset that’s not at all consistent across the board, and I live in constant fear that I’m going to introduce some bugs in my code which subsequently lead to errors that I have no way of tracking easily.

Ah the joy of bioinformatics - not!

I also barely managed to get half of my readings done, which is much too slow to my liking. I don’t know what has happened to my productivity. I can’t seem to concentrate and ended up re-reading paragraphs upon paragraphs, and kept on doubling back to check on details. I really need to put away my personal worries, or at least stash them at home when I leave for the lab in the morning, and get my research back on track.

Personal tasks for the week though had been duly carried out and completed, which I supposed says for something, that I still feel some sort of control over my life. That can only be a good thing right?

So I had a relatively short week last week to complete a whole lot of tasks, but I did manage it quite well (or so I think anyway). In which case, I also cheated a little as I continued to work on the items while I was in Paris. Not much, just a couple of hours in the morning, to check on my script etc.

It feels good though, to cross out the tasks as I go along.

It was a little bit of a nightmare though, working on the boy’s Macbook with azerty keyboard instead of qwerty AND having to hunt for various keys - it is a Mac afterall, who doesn’t seem to believe to show all the vital keys and I had to search high and low for the combinations to get a tilda, curly bracket etc. Gaaaah…

Now, arriving back after a few days away, somehow the progress from last week seem insignificant again. My boss had just piled on more stuff, after a short discussion with him this morning on all the different projects etc. *gulp*

It’s my turn, along with VM, to prepare presentations of articles in journal club this week. Woes behold and all, I still couldn’t quite decide which article to present, although it will be along the line of positive selection and evolution. I have 3 candidate articles at hand, so I need to make a decision and start working on it.

Luckily (perhaps) I’m leaving work early today for a dental appointment, and I’ll be going straight home from there. I guess this means I’ll have some good time in the evening to check through these, and get started on the presentation slides.

Sometimes I do wonder though if journal club is taken seriously by everyone. And I also question if the articles of choice will be of interest to everyone in the lab. Afterall, that is the purpose of journal club - to keep up with latest development within relevant field that’s of the lab’s general interest, while practicing presentation skill.

The latter is cool, because I am the proverbial nervous mouse when it comes to giving a presentation. Luckily though, with journal club as well as seminar series, I’ve been given the chance to give a couple of talks just to work on my skill. So far it’s going quite well as training goes. As long as I remember to speak slowly and clearly, and use lots of graphics on the slides instead of paragraphs of words.