I'm not really sure who will be reading this at this point but I'm hoping eventually, if people are interested, I hope this might be something I continue through my 4 year PhD scholarship. As well as trying to share the highs and lows of an early career researcher I also think it will be a good experience for me to put down in writing my experiences as I go. I don't often get to write in a relaxed manner such as this and I definitely don't normally get to communicate the extreme highs and lows of life as a scientist in any format other than our microplastic group chat (which normally falls on deaf ears as everyone is in the same boat here). If I look back at the last three years since I sold my business and enrolled on my masters I have experienced so many emotions and amazing experiences I wish I'd documented them before now. I have been lucky enough to spend time at sea off of Plymouth in the south west where I study but also spend 7 weeks on the RRS James Clark Ross traveling 8000 miles due south through the Atlantic. I will reflect on that trip in coming blogs because it was such a unique and special trip, of which I am still processing samples from, it is worthy of some time writing.
As this is my first blog it is probably worth me introducing myself a bit more. I am not your average PhD student (although I don't think there is such a thing as average in academia). I graduated from Swansea University in 2004 with a 2.1 in Marine Biology. I wanted to work in marine science after uni but, as with most graduates, struggled to find a job with no experience under my belt. As a result eventually I just slipped into a job in retail in Salcombe, south Devon. After being made redundant (thank god) I set up my own business designing and importing hand painted picture tiles and selling them online and wholesale. After 6 years I decided it was time to get back into marine science, so 11 years after graduating, I enrolled in a research masters in marine biology at Plymouth University. The business was sold and I bought my first house in Plymouth and with some serious concerns over the ability of my brain to perform science again I started my masters. It was a huge learning curve (still is) but thankfully my dominating personally trait of perseverance seriously paid off and I managed to persuade an old friend at Plymouth Marine Laboratory (Dr. Pennie Lindeque) to take me on as her student for the supervision of my own idea for a project investigating the incidence of ingestion of microplastics in fish larvae in the wild. Pennie, or any one in the lab, had no experience with fish larvae at all so this was my first challenge. Thankfully PML has alot of expertise for extracting microplastics from biota and environmental samples such as water or sediment so this I could learn "in house". I got to grips with the project over a few months and started (with alot of excitement) trips out to sea on the research boat to collect my larvae and water samples. Everything pretty much went to plan, with as much going wrong as I had expected but not too much that anything overran so my project was completed, my thesis written (badly) and submitted a week early. This might seem keen but there was a very good reason for getting my thesis handed in early. A week later I was stepping onto a 98m Royal Research Ship run by the British Antarctic Survey with the destination of the Falklands 7 weeks later. A bit of a step up from a 30m ex whaler run by PML and also more worryingly I was embarking on the ship with no supervisor... no phone... just email. I had spent nearly £10,000 on equipment, my berth on the ship was funded by PML but was, as you can imagine, not cheap, and I was solely responsible for executing all we had planned. Thankfully the sheer excitement of the trip was my motivation to make it all work. Plus the fact that I knew this was a trip of a lifetime that I was very lucky to be on. Its had come around after a conversation with the principal scientist for the cruise at PML and alot of negotiating to both fit me and my sampling in the schedule of the ship and also fund it all. I remember the moment I found out I got the berth - I literally ran back down the stairs from the PSIs office to Pennie holding in a scream of excitement. I bounced around for about a week afterwards....until I realised how much work was involved in preparing for the cruise and that both Pennie and the lab technician was away on holiday for the month where I had to pack it all up and fill in the hugely complicated paperwork. All this was during the last few months of my masters where I was trying to finish lab work and write up. Thankfully I'm good at time management and packing! So anyway... the story of the cruise will come in a later blog. Along with what happened after the cruise; publishing my first paper and applying for PhDs... all 14 of them over 2 years whilst also reverting back to earning money on the end of a paint brush which I had really hoped I'd left behind.
I'm hoping to write a blog every few weeks, initially documenting in a very non scientific manner my first three years back in marine science and then once I am up to present time you will have the joy of sharing my new topic with me... not Antarctica where I had hoped... or the tropics... or even the beautiful west coast of Scotland. Nope. Sewage. I am spending 4 years looking at microplastics in sewage. I have a feeling there will be some dark humour at times and plenty of crap jokes (*ahem*). I will leave you with my first few photos from the start of my PhD. A conference with my new team in Lanzerote and my first experience of a waste water treatment plant with some of the microplastics team at the university - we took the nose clips off for the photo!
Thanks for reading!
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