#phd adventures

1.26.26

₊˚ˑ༄⌯⌲jul. 28,2026⋆｡˚

migraine fog, but the microscope glowed anyway. made it to class. made it to the o-ptir. grateful i was able to show up today (imaging an aged stroke mouse brain !!) ٩(๑❛ᴗ❛๑)۶

#100DaysofProductivity — Day 33

11.09.2025

⏯️ Unhateable by Ashtin Larold

📚 A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas

Happy Friday everyone! I’m posting a little early for once because I have to catch a train in the evening and go meet my boyfriend in Brussels. He’s been working with a collaborator all week to try and put a project together and now we get to enjoy the city a little!

This week has been so, so busy and I have been so, so tired. We’re not quite back to 2 cans of monster a day kind of tired, but almost. I did end up giving my presentation on Wednesday and it went really well! One of the attendees ripped into me a little, but I thought her comments were basic and got brilliant feedback from other people, so overall I feel like it’s more of a step forward than a step back. I also had a really productive 1:1 meeting with my supervisor, so maybe that helped me feel more positive as well.

I’ve also had an interesting time in the lab. I’m currently helping out with a CTL clone isolation, so lots of blood processing and magnetic separation for me, and it gave me an opportunity to teach our new research assistant those techniques as well. As much as I know I would hate teaching in a classroom, there is something about showing someone a new protocol that I just love. Maybe I’m just a lab rat after all. Follow up on last week’s protein extraction: only 2 out of 6 proteins worked. I’m not sure what exactly went wrong, but I can repeat the extraction with the other 4 next week. I’m not too disappointed, I still got a good yield for the two that worked! Another thing that hasn’t worked so well has been my cell expansion tests. Thanks to my presentation feedback I have some ideas of what I can do to fix it, but we shall have to see if any of it works.

I haven’t been out of the lab much this week, which is lovely cause it makes me days go by so much faster. Still, while I wait for my supervisor to give feedback on my midterm report I started working on tearing apart the paper I’m going to present for journal club. It’s not for another month, but it’s always good to get started early…