aug 5, 2024: a week in the life

this week

BIG MILESTONE ALERT! This week, I submitted my first-year report, a relatively brief summary of my progress during year 1 of this PhD. I am ever grateful for the support of many communities that enabled me to put together this work. It’s a relief to get that document behind me, but deadlines continue to pile on top of me … I have been working to finalise my poster for my September conference, which is generally looking better than before, but I have now found even more things that make it look terrible! I’m learning that this is the reality of designing a research presentation. Luckily, I have around half a day on Monday to get that work up to standard before sending it to my supervisor for perusal. On the side, I’ve been trying to improve my interpretation of my primary analysis findings, which has demanded a new level of understanding in terms of the psychologic and physiologic processes implicated in donation complications. I’ve found that I’m most fulfilled when knee-deep in that “making meaning” work, despite its difficulty and frustrations.

next week

I promised I would start preparing for my first-year assessment last week, but I’ve done nothing on that front this past week! That means I’ll need to get myself together and collate a list of potential questions and their answers in the next week. I will complete my poster for final printing and hope to respond to forthcoming comments from colleagues on my revised draft of my review!

outside the lab

I plunged into nostalgia in the middle of the week when I ate out at a Xi’an restaurant with a PhD colleague - what a delight! Xi’an is a central Chinese city that I visited almost a decade ago for a bit of medical tourism, and my order, 肉夹馍 (“rou jia mo”), took me right back.

on the reading list

Zyśko D, Szewczuk-Bogusławska M, Kaczmarek M, Agrawal AK, Rudnicki J, Gajek J, Melander O, Sutton R, Fedorowski A. Reflex syncope, anxiety level, and family history of cardiovascular disease in young women: case-control study. Europace. 2015 Feb;17(2):309-13. doi: 10.1093/europace/euu200.

weekly photo

I normally don’t share research-related photos here, but here’s the cover page of my newly submitted first-year report :)

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!