Tag: PhD

Letters from my PhD

Oriol Pavón1 Comment

Oh shit it’s November!

This sentence pretty much summarises my experience in London so far. It also entails that it’s been a bit more than one and a half months since I moved to this humongous city to start my PhD. One and a half months that have gone, just like that. So it feels like the perfect moment to start a new section in my blog: a place where once a month(ish) I’ll try to write about how this PhD thingy is going. You can expect to find things about the Programme I’m in, the science and the life of a PhD student in London, and any other random things I fancy sharing in here.Read More »

The place where lost time goes

Oriol Pavón1 Comment

I am gonna get so much work done today. There is nothing like coming back from holidays with a fresh and recharged mind. Let’s start by catching up with emails from work, maybe there is something of outmost importance I must reply to…

But chances are that there is nothing of outmost importance there, and what usually happens is that one email leads to another, and then a quick peek at Twitter/Facebook leads you to the latest post of that blog you like, which happens to have a catchy title, and next thing you hear is someone asking: “Anyone coming for lunch?” Mother of… Damn! Lunch time already? “I can’t, sorry, I have so much stuff to do. I am so busy today”.

wasted-day

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On something I published

Oriol PavónLeave a comment

Now that PhD interviews are over and, with them, this whole process of applying for PhDs has come to its end, I find myself with enough time to do some writing and liven up this blog a bit. And with that in mind, I wanted to share the first piece I have written and has been published in a journal (yay!).

When I was in Oxford I started collaborating as a page editor with Phenotype, a journal of the Oxford University Biochemical Society that every term publishes short articles by students, postdocs, PIs and alumni from a wide range of disciplines. After I handed in my MSc Thesis I decided that it would be cool to write about what I had been doing those six months I spent in the lab, and it would be even cooler to try to get it published so that everyone could read it. So I gave it a go and ended up writing about the method I learned and used in my experiments.Read More »

Unexpected advice

Oriol Pavón3 Comments

I woke up today feeling that it would be a writing day. It was about time, I should really be getting on with my motivation letters for PhD applications. But then this interesting post about how cuttlefish hold their breath to hide from predators caught my attention. It turns out that by covering their gills they decrease the generation of electrical signals in that area and thus make it more difficult for sharks to sense them.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/thumb_article_l/public/sn-cuttlefish.jpg
http://news.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/thumb_article_l/public/sn-cuttlefish.jpg

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