july 8, 2024: a week in the life

this week

The most consistent part of my work this week was my daily removal of 100-200 words from my first-year report, which is already over-length without even being complete! I’ll learn to expect a similar problem when it comes to writing my thesis … In the meantime, I tried to improve the clarity of each chapter and look forward to doing more next week before I send a draft off to my supervisor on Friday. As promised, I investigated the methodology of my proposed simulation study a little more, though not as much as I could have … another task to carry forward. Importantly, though, I decided between two proposals for survey studies of global blood services that I hope to share with senior researchers in the next few months.

next week

I plan to continue refining my first-year report, as well as brainstorming potential questions from my assessors, who both have expertise in non-communicable disease epidemiology and big data. I hope that’ll be fun :) And BIG NEWS! My abstract has been accepted for poster presentation at the British Blood Transfusion Society’s annual conference in Glasgow in September, so I’ll need to start thinking about visual ways to showcase my first primary analysis.

outside the lab

I haven’t been doing much this week, though I did have the great honour of delivering a careers talk to current students and graduates of my Masters programme!

on the reading list

Tolmunen T, Lehto SM, Heliste M, Kurl S, Kauhanen J. Alexithymia is associated with increased cardiovascular mortality in middle-aged Finnish men. Psychosom Med. 2010 Feb;72(2):187-91.

weekly photo

An alighting passenger from my morning commute.

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!