#phd adventures

1.26.26

#100DaysofProductivity — Day 34

₊˚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

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…

19.Aug.2026

Damn.

It's been a few months of intense fMRI data collection, picking myself up off the floor upon failure after failure, long days, long nights, the Andalusian heat, struggling to understand my own work, and yet many beautiful memories created as well since my last update. Listen, I do believe that working hard gets you things, but I also do not believe that you just get magically rewarded after working suuuper hard- in academia at least, you can work yourself to death and never see the fruits of your labor and that's normal for many researchers. However, I do believe that there's something magical about doing this for the love of the game and that I do have a certain special sauce recipe for that/having some good luck. On an abstract that I almost *didn't* submit to a conference because I was so insecure and self-deprecating about my work but my supervisor comforted me and ultimately convinced me to submit, I was not only given a spotlight poster designation but I also was selected to give a talk :) (!!!). I really was shocked when I got the news, I mean always in the back of my mind I think my work is cool, it's good, thorough, I know my colleagues are well-respected researchers who make me better- but I'm still only a PhD student learning the ropes and very much a novice in the field- so it was pretty fucking cool to get to this point.

The talk could have gone better had I had more time to prepare (chaotic family shit, I was at the hospital for some days visiting + grieving a different family member the week before), but it was still solid. Solid enough to get compliments in the following days at the conference and even some kind messages on social media :) I'm so grateful for the opportunity, the luck, whatever you wanna call it!