may 20, 2024: a week in the life

this week

I’ve made a mistake. Halfway through the week, I started questioning how useful my first primary analysis was and emailed my supervisor in a toned-down panic. We met at the end of the week to talk things through and decided that the best way to proceed would be to keep what parts of the analysis I could while tuning up some parts so that they fit better with the “story” of my thesis and contributed more substantially to the evidence base. So this weekend, I pulled a working-for-too-long day and got some ideas and code together. I’m going to present everything next week and see how things go … Luckily, at this preliminary stage, I can say that I feel more confident about these analyses than the originals. During the rest of the week, I presented the old version of my primary analysis (which, despite not being very clear, received some kind comments from attendees about their design) and developed a proposal for some future work that might incorporate some data linkage! Fun times.

next week

Deadlines INCOMING! I will need to prepare an abstract for submission to a transfusion-focused conference later this year, and I’ll also be preparing some slides for our first-year PhD presentations. I feel like I’ve said that before … I might’ve procrastinated those slides a little, and I promise I’ll get them done very soon. And I have to edit my systematic review and meta-analysis thesis draft in accordance with my supervisor’s comments which, thankfully, I think I’m handling okay.

outside the lab

On Wednesday, I forced myself to have an all-out relaxing night and hung out with some college friends during a formal dinner! A cheese tart, a potato thing with some poultry and romesco sauce, and some kind of sweet berry creation were served. I feel very lucky to have access to good food in good community.

on the reading list

Peffer K, den Heijer M, de Kort WLAM, Verbeek ALM, Atsma F. Cardiovascular risk in 159 934 frequent blood donors while addressing the healthy donor effect. Heart. 2019 Aug;105(16):1260-1265.

weekly photo

Some handheld flowers I made.

about me

I’m Yaning (she/her), a PhD candidate in Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. I am working with colleagues in the Blood and Transplant Research Unit, the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit, and NHS Blood and Transplant (England’s national blood service) to improve the safety and efficiency of voluntary whole blood donation. I’m supervised by the amazing Dr Lois Kim and funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research. This is my blog about my journey through this candidature, starting from nine months before my transfer of status. Please feel free to reach out at yw645 [at] cam [dot] ac [dot] uk!