Today!

Today was one of those joyous "working from home" days that seem like they should be easy to find, but eventually turn out to be difficult to schedule. There's always some tool who schedules a meeting for 1/2 and hour or something on your free day that just completely messes it up. Anyway, I managed to hold onto this one somehow, and this is what I did.

- washing
- hanging out washing
- taking washing back in when it started to rain really hard and the washing was completely wet again in about 30 seconds
- drying the washing again
- baking bread
- cooking lunch
- cleaning the floors

Ok ok, true I did that stuff, but that's not at all interesting here I guess. What I did, "work related" included

- read over Louise Manitzky's PhD confirmation of candidature document
- reviewed some literature related to colorectal cancer
- chipped away at some manuscripts I'm working on

Confirmation

If you are not in the know, Confirmation of Candidature is the 1 year milestone in the PhD student journey. It involves presenting a seminar to the department (publicly, but not often do outsiders show up) and also preparing a document to demonstrate a) that you have a project, b) that the project might go somewhere and c) that you have made some progress towards getting to that "somewhere".

I'm on the panel to assess/evaluate Louise's confirmation, so I read the document, attend the seminar and then, along with the rest of the panel, interview/question her afterwards.

I kind of like reading these things. They are written at a stage where (usually) the student is still in the process of figuring out all about the things they are studying, so they aren't horribly overburdened with jargon and complicated things that outsiders would have no chance of following...so I was actually able to follow most of this document in other words. I'm looking forward to the seminar tomorrow too - usually I don't have questions, but the pre-reading of the document means I have a heads up regarding what Louise is going to say. So I've already got questions.

Colorectal cancer

I have been getting behind with knowing the literature for my PhD students' projects, so I'm really working hard at the moment to get myself back up to speed. After all, it's important to know what the hell they are on about! Tris is working on some modelling of colorectal cancer and the host immune response. The story goes that even though the cells involved in colon and rectal cancer do present tumour associated antigen (ie the stuff that the immune system responds to) the immune response is often quite weak - particularly in advanced tumours. We are looking at this situation, and looking to develop a model that goes beyond this to investigate potential immunotherapeutic treatments.

Chipping away

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I'm really having a lot of success with "chipping away" at things. I've got lots of projects on the go at the moment - I counted yesterday and if you include even the most dubious of prospects, I'm currently drafting 16 papers. In all seriousness, probably 8-10 of those will ever go anywhere. Anyway, I find it near on impossible to hold all of these in my head at one time, or to simply sit and work away at one for a long period of time. What I've been doing is "letting go" and just letting the papers sit, but spending short periods (1-2 hours) at a time on lots of different things. So I might actually work on the paper draft for about 4-5 papers in any one day. It's going quite nicely - before you know it, you've got some reasonable writing done at the end of each week.

Sleep

Weirdly, I've started going to bed early since I came back from Europe. Around 9-10pm is when I've been dropping off. Plus, I'm waking up at 5.30 in the morning and doing the breakfast prep thing for the family. It's strange - I'm not feeling tired in the mornings and I'm actually finding it easy to get up at that time. Hopefully this continues into the winter when the cold Ipswich mornings may squash this newfound morning energy! We also haven't been watching TV at all lately - I really like this. Even though I do like some TV shows, I hate the idea of watching TV...it's such a waste. Maybe that is also contributing to the lack of tiredness. Time will tell I guess.