Print This PostMy favourite thing about doing a PhD was the variety of things I found myself doing on a weekly basis. But before I got started, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was getting myself into and pictured myself holed up in the lab all day every day. If you don’t know someone who has done a PhD, there can be a lot of mystery around what it’s like to do one. A PhD is a huge commitment, taking many years to complete, with massive amounts of work and stress involved; but how do you know if doing one is for you? To help you understand what you might be stepping into, in this blog I’m telling you what a week in the life of a PhD student can look like.
For my PhD, I researched neuro-immune mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome, using preclinical models. This was a largely wet lab-based project, during which I did some bioinformatic studies. Although I originally wanted this to be a “day in the life” blog, the reality was that my days varied hugely throughout my three and a half years. Therefore, I’m giving an example of what a typical week looked like during each year of my PhD.
Year 1
In my first year, I spent much time learning and developing skills that I needed for the subsequent years. I learnt how to design and conduct experiments and spent lots of time refining what my overall project would look like. The main lab technique in my first year was immunohistochemistry, and I spent around 60% of my time in the lab. As this technique involves many steps, this time would be further broken up into using a microtome or cryostat to thinly section and mount brain tissue, optimising new antibodies or carrying out a staining experiment across multiple days. Once the staining was complete, I would spend some time on the microscope capturing images of my staining (when it finally worked!).
FindAPhD is a comprehensive guide to PhD studentships and postgraduate research degrees.
The remaining 40% of my time was focussed on tasks outside of the lab. These included attending meetings (supervision (1 hour a week), lab (1-2 hours a week) and departmental (1 hour every second week)), reading papers, planning experiments, ordering reagents, and attending online trainings run by the doctoral school (such as statistics courses). Overall, a week in my first year was very self-focussed, spending a lot of time developing research skills and learning how to be a PhD student. This was definitely exacerbated by the pandemic, whereby there were fewer opportunities to explore outside of the lab.
Year 2
A typical week in the second year of my PhD looked a bit different to my first year. My project was more established, and I had built up a repertoire of lab techniques, as well as increased confidence in what I was doing. My experiments upped the ante in volume in my second year as I moved to ex vivo studies using organotypic brain slice cultures. About 75% of my time was spent in the lab, with long hours spent in the tissue culture hood. This happened to be in a different building to my normal lab and office, and a different building again from the biological services facility. That’s a story for another time, but let’s just say I got a lot of steps in that year. Because of this ex vivo work, my lab time was more split across multiple assays, including qPCR, western blotting, ELISAs and immunofluorescence, on top of long hours in tissue culture; there was always something to be done and I became incredibly efficient in planning my lab time.
Although I was spending more time in the lab in a week than before, things outside of the lab had also upped the ante. On top of previous commitments, like data analysis, I also began to get involved in various committees organising conferences and outreach events, and so meetings for these were added to my weekly roster of supervision, lab and departmental meetings. Although I was much busier, I felt more fulfilled by both the experiments and the more “extra-curricular” type activities. Unlike my first year, a week in my second year was taking me beyond my own research, allowing me to develop a larger network and have wider experiences.
Year 3
In my third and final year of my PhD, I carried out a proteomics study which took me away from the lab to spend a large portion of my time doing more bioinformatic analysis. Therefore, the lab to office ratio did quite the flip and I moved to spending only 30% of my time in the lab in a typical week. This would be carrying out some assays such as western blots to validate certain hits from my proteomics study. But about 40-50% of my time was more focussed in on data analysis, meaning more time spent at my desk. This process involved learning how to do analysis, researching different programmes and a lot of trial and error. The remaining 20-30% of my time continued to be made up with meetings, experiment planning, and starting to plan my thesis! Although this was a big shift from previous years, it was good to have a varied experience. The final half-year of my PhD was for getting down to business and actually writing up my thesis, a time when I was completely removed from the lab.
Overall, you can see that a PhD can really be varied with no two days looking the same. However, I hope that looking at an average week from each of my three years will give you an idea of what this wet-lab PhD student got up to!
Clíona Farrell
Author
Dr Clíona Farrell is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the UK Dementia Research Institute at University College London. Her work focuses on understanding neuroinflammation in Down syndrome, both prior to, and in response to, Alzheimer’s disease pathology. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Clíona completed her undergraduate degree in Neuroscience in Trinity College, and then worked as a research assistant in the Royal College of Surgeons studying ALS and Parkinson’s disease. She also knows the secret behind scopping the perfect 99 ice-cream cone.
Dementia Researcher
