No Worries...

Hurrah! It is done. I survived! I have now officially done my last presentation of the academic year. I think it went OK. I was last so everyone was pretty much asleep when I started, and I had to shout above the sound of drilling in the other room but all in all it wasn't too bad. I only got asked 4 or 5 questions, which compared to other people's grillings was really nice. There are 3 possible reasons for this:

1. The examiners were brain dead after sitting through so many complicated presentations.
2. My presentation was so awful they didn't see the point in prolonging the pain by asking too many questions.
3. My presentation covered my project pretty well and didn't leave too many questions to ask (hoping its this reason!!).

All the questions were in my opinion really easy to answer (but that might just be because I sat up really late the night before reading everything to do with the assays I used so any question would be easy.) so i left with a big smile on my face. Unfortunately from about 2 minutes before my presentation I decided I was dying for a wee. So I spent the whole 20 minutes of my presentation/questions thinking more about my bladder than anything else. Thank goodness its worth only about 2% of my final grade. Curiously the second my presentation was over I didn't need a wee at all, clearly this BSc is sending me loco.

Rather than knuckling down and finishing my dissertation I decided to travel home after the presentation. So since I've been home, as much as I've told myself I'll do some work. I just haven't. So today I'm going to totally finish the first draft of my dissertation. And after I've finished my draft I am going to a High School Musical birthday party! Woo! Oh to be 9 years old again... Although I'm sure when I was 9 i never got a party with 55 friends invited. I don't think i ever had 55 friends all at one time in one place.

On a completely unrelated note I started reading a new book yesterday. It's called The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. It's really weird, but so far its the good type of weird. I had crazy dreams last night. Not quite as crazy as my dream the other night where I had a whole herd of elephants. All my elephants wanted was a tin of chopped tomatoes for dinner. Unfortunately I had nothing but 2 bread rolls to feed all of them. It was quite Biblical.

Lily xXx

SUPERvisor

OK. I realise I've moaned a lot about my supervisor, but today in just 2 hours he was so useful that I'm starting to think that he might actually be secretely brilliant. He spent 2 hours this morning going through 6 of our project presentations and made amazingly useful comments. He also gave us loads of tips on answering questions and general presentation manner. It's never really occured to me that a scientist who presents well is like a politician, they make whatever information they have sound interesting and relevant, even if its not really showing anything new. I learnt an apt new saying today, "There are lies, damn lies and statistics". Very very very true.

I left Uni this morning feeling alot better about my project, so i decided to get some more of my write up done. 6 pages of results later, it just wouldn't save. Nooooo. I've finally learnt the hard way to press the save button every few minutes. I'm trying to look on the positive side, at least now I know I can do those 6 pages again without having to think as hard.

Only 23 days until the deadline... eek!

Lily xXx

Progress At Last!

Finally... my supervisor sent me some results. Unfortunately he didn't send me the protocols for the assays we used, so he's only been half useful, but at least it's a start. Amusingly the email to which my results were attached was filled with praise. To summarise it basically said:
"You were the sole driving force behind this project and you should be very pleased with the results you have. You are amazingly wonderful and I worship your studenty researchyness" (clearly I have paraphrased).

It is obvious he's realised that with his almost total lack of help I am so close to making a big complaint about him and his ignoring me!

On a side note I've really enjoying being back at work this weekend. I forgot how much I enjoyed working behind a bar and all the nice people I work with. Even my near-death experience with a bottle of sambuca falling off a high shelf and onto my head didn't dampen my spirits. My most amusing story of the weekend was that one very drunk man proceeded to call me ginger (I'm strawberry blonde!!) and then ask if he could check if my hair colour is real (i'll leave that to your imagination) after taking me out for dinner. Surprisingly my answer was "No, but if you ask the doorman the same question I'm sure he'll show you something." Yukky man! Amusingly my dad was standing about 3 people along at the bar at this point and decided to introduce himself, and talk all about his collection of sharp chopping knives...

Lily xXx

Sudden burst of motivation

Today I actually managed to get some work done. In the morning I had a project presentation meeting which went better than expected. Worryingly one of my supervisors doesn't think I'll have enough data, which is a huge pain the bum, but i got some useful tips on stats to use. He's also going to read over what I've done of my introduction and method. I know my introduction is too short at 2800 words but I'm stuck with how to make it any bigger. I'm also hoping I'll get some guidance on my method as I totally don't know where I'm going with it. As I haven't done the actual assays I don't know the reagents used or if I'll even have to include them in my write up.

When i got home i wrote up 2 lectures into my big revision note book. Even though I'm still a good 2 weeks behind my revision timetable it feels pretty good to have a bit of motivation to start writing up more lectures. Reassuringly, according to the course supervisor not many people have started revision so maybe I'm going to do really well or maybe it'll just take longer for me to absorb the information because I'm thick?

Tomorrow I've been told to go to a meeting about presentations. Annoyingly, not only do I not yet have the results to put into my presentation, but I also have no idea where it's being held. Because I'm tagging along with another group of people they all know where it is, so no doubt I'll be wandering around the corridoors lost. It's very tempting not to go. I managed to go without help for the last presentation, so surely this one can't be that different?

I guess I'll see if my sore throat and ear ache gets worse in the morning, and decide if I'll go or not then.

Lily xXx

Who I am and why I'm here

Here's another try at blogging and this time I'm actually going to stick with it. I feel the need to blabber on about my uni days and general life, and thought that a bit of blogging will give my poor flatmates' ears a rest.

I'm an intercalating medical student at a London medical school. Unfortunately I feel that intercalating was a bad bad bad bad bad move, I seem to have picked the least organised course and my project has had soooo many disasters.

Tomorrow the evil project is making me get up at 5.30am!!! I didn't even know that there was a 5.30 in the morning. All so i can pick my samples up from one hospital and rush them around to another hospital on the other side of London. Madness. So now not only am I a medical student, but im a courrier too!

On the plus side I remembered to buy some milk for breakfast.

Lily xXx