Blog – The PhD Comfort Zone

I have now been in Oxford working on my PhD for 18 months, a year and a half. I am well into my second year, and the word thesis has been thrown around a couple of times, which is terrifying. I start each day with my 30-minute walk to work and reward myself with a cappuccino from my favourite coffee stand outside the lab. I comfortably run my experiments mostly independently, spend some time teaching, plan more experiments, write up my progress, and apart from a stressful day here and there, I am really happy! I love my PhD project. I struggled with the learning curve at times in my first year, and now I feel like everything is coming together.

However, the last few months have quite literally flown past me. As a scientist, I am aware that this is the phenomenon of neural repetition suppression, modulating my time perception. I am happy, I am in a routine, I am comfortable, and as a result, my brain is mostly on autopilot. My first year feels 10 times longer, as my neurons were working extremely hard to assimilate all the new information. Now that I have climbed that steep learning curve, my neurons appear to be a bit lazier. I am deep in my PhD comfort zone.

Enter the FENS forum 2026, I read about the Early-Career Training Programme, an opportunity for students from around the world to undertake an internship at a host lab in Spain or Portugal for 2/3 weeks preceding the FENS conference. This excellent scheme provides short and focused research projects and provides training and networking opportunities for career progression. Most importantly for me, it provided the opportunity to see how another lab operates. My lab is brilliant, and I feel very lucky to be there, but there is something to be said for experiencing a different work environment.

I read through the project list, and I found one that aligned perfectly with what I am currently doing in my PhD, just in the context of a different disease, Glioblastoma. It was based at the University of Salamanca; a quick Google search revealed that this “Golden City” was Spain’s equivalent of Oxford. I was sold. I told my supervisor, submitted my application and met with the host lab on Teams, who I thought were brilliant and I really wanted to work with. FENS later informed me that I had been successful, and I set off for Salamanca in early June. I packed my bags for a month in Spain, three weeks in Salamanca and one week in Barcelona for the conference, and now I am writing this blog, sitting in the beautiful city, offering you my reflections on getting out of your comfort zone.

I was the only student in Salamanca on this internship, as each host lab only took one student. I quickly learned that my beginner-level Spanish would not do in the lab where everyone was a native speaker, and I set to reading a dictionary over and over again, also practising my Spanish at every given moment. The lab was extremely kind, patient and supportive during my internship; it was quite honestly the best work environment I have witnessed, full of collaboration, support, work-life balance and encouragement. Although it was intimidating at first, particularly speaking Spanish at every instance when navigating this new city, the experience was fantastic. I learned new skills in tissue culture, made new friends, listened to defence presentations in Spanish, immersed myself in glioblastoma research and brought some of my skills and projects to share with the lab. Most importantly, this was my first experience of building my own cross-disease collaboration, not handling a collaboration that my supervisor had set up. This increased my confidence in networking with senior professionals and communicating across disciplines with a shared goal of advancing research in respective fields.

I am extremely grateful to Professor Arantxa Tabernero, Myriam Jaraíz Rodríguez and the whole Tabernero Lab for making my experience so fantastic. It was truly so rewarding because it was so far out of my comfort zone and so removed from Oxford (apart from the beautiful buildings).

This enabled me to think more creatively about my project; to change up a routine and explore a more balanced approach to work and life, which has admittedly been difficult to establish in Oxford.

As a PhD early-career researcher, it is incredibly important to explore all of your opportunities post-PhD, to invest some time (the most precious resource we have as researchers) into your career progression and career options. I spent my first year of my PhD completely neglecting this, staying in my research comfort zone at the bench and in a bubble of research. Some of the most brilliant experiences I have had are because I chose to dedicate time to exploring different opportunities that a PhD can open up; I would encourage others to do the same.

Please do look at the FENS ECTP programme; it was truly excellent. This was reflected at the closing party at the start of FENS when all the awardees from around the world gathered to share their experience across Spain and Portugal in host labs, and we all converged on the theme that the people in the labs made our experiences so excellent. This is a reminder to get out of your research and PhD comfort zone.

Harriet Greene

Author

Harriet Greene is a PhD student at the University of Oxford researching dementia prevention, with a focus on how vascular risk factors such as hypertension affect the brain. Her project models the neurovascular unit in vitro, allowing her to explore biological mechanisms creatively and collaborate across departments and disease areas. Supported by the British Heart Foundation for research consumables, Harriet is also interested in biotech start-ups and translating lab discoveries into patient benefit. Outside academia, she is a scuba diving instructor, shell collector and lover of the sea, with a strong belief in paying kindness forward within the research community.

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