• Question: Did your investigation take a lot of planning?

    Asked by Callie to Francesca, Laura, Matthew, Andrew, Rebecca on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Laura Schofield

      Laura Schofield answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Yes quite a lot. I was lucky that I was taking over the research from someone else, so had a pretty good platform to start from, but I spent the first month of my PhD just reading! Then I spent another month planning what reactions to do and how to do them before I actually did anything!
      It is really important to plan everything thoroughly before you start so that you know exactly what to expect and know what could go wrong before it happens!

    • Photo: Matthew Camilleri

      Matthew Camilleri answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Yes, it takes a long time to plan out, and sometimes all your plans can easily fall apart with one experiment that does not work, does not want to cooperate.

      A good plan would have a number of sub plans for when things go wrong, even though some experiments have to be done regardless of the plans you make. My current plan has taken a whole month to set up, and I spend an hour a day making adjustments on my overall plan.

    • Photo: Andrew McKinley

      Andrew McKinley answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Planning an investigation takes a lot of planning. Quite a lot of time though the investigation evolves as you go through, so what you wind up publishing may not be precisely what you set out to achieve!

      I think that the first year of my PhD was effectively spent planning! I think only one experiment from that year actually made it into my thesis in the end!

    • Photo: Francesca Palombo

      Francesca Palombo answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      Quite some – essentially I need to figure out the sample preparation, then the measurement itself is pretty straightforward but then data analysis and interpretation to extract the relevant information is crucial

    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      Definitely, it helps that generally you are continuing on or building upon someone else’s work rather than starting on something with absolutely no help and guidance but you do have to think carefully about what kind of molecules you want to study and what you might learn as a result.

Comments