Podcasts

Podcast – MSc Complete, reflecting with Morgan Daniel

Hosted by Adam Smith

Reading Time: 32 minutes

For the past year Dementia Researcher has been following Morgan Daniel as she studies for her Dementia & Neuroscience MSc at University College London. In this final round-up podcast, Adam Smith catches up with Morgan as she completes her degree to reflect on the year.

It’s been an eventful year for Morgan, moving from Glasgow, studying during the pandemic, learning and finding a new way to study, and deciding what comes next. For the past year Morgan has been writing a monthly blog to share her experiences, and providing great tips for anyone going working through grad school.

In her monthly blogs Morgan has covered everything from the practicalities of moving, how to find the course that is right for you, coping with stress and homesickness, top tips for studying, how gradschool differs from undergraduate studies and so much more. You can find all her blogs here #MorgansMScStory

You will be pleased to know that since recording this podcast Morgan received a number of job offers, and successfully started her dream job as an Assistant Psychologist in Neuropsychology at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.


Click here to read a full transcript of this podcast in English 🇬🇧

Voice Over:

Welcome to the NIHR Dementia Researcher podcast brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society, supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

Adam Smith:

Hello and welcome to Dementia Researcher, a science, and careers podcast for everyone, not just dementia researchers, despite the name. I’m Adam Smith. I’m the program director for the NIHR, which probably sounds much fancier than it actually is, and I’m one of the people behind this show. On this podcast, we aim to drop some knowledge on you and encourage you to discover something new about the research field you work in, or to discover something about another field and how it connects to your own because connections are important. We also hope to provide a little support and advice to get you through all the different stages of your career, from undergraduate to finally getting that tenure position that seems so far off in the distance.

Adam Smith:

Today’s show is for the Instagramming pragmatic Generation Z to give them an idea of what they can expect if they decide to pursue an MSc and to encourage them to make dementia the focus of their studies. To help me uncover the truth behind student life, I’m joined by a very special guest. She started blogging for us and sharing her journey almost a year ago, and having made the move from Glasgow to London, she’s lived through lockdown studies, remote learning, and is about to finish her MSc in dementia and neuroscience at UCL. Hello, Morgan Daniel.

Morgan Daniel:

Hi. It’s good to be back on another podcast.

Adam Smith:

You didn’t mind me calling you a Generation Z? Would you consider yourself in that generation?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, I’m not quite up to date with the TikTok generation, but yeah, I’m one of the Instagrammers, so you’ve got me.

Adam Smith:

I was just going to say, you are on Instagram though, right?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah. You’ve got me there. Yeah.

Adam Smith:

Well, can you believe it’s been 11 months since we recorded our very first introductory podcast with you?

Morgan Daniel:

No. I mean, I suppose this year was a bit strange, so part of it flew. I can’t believe it’s been 11 months. It’s flown by, and I’m almost at the end now, which is scary to think but at the same time, obviously, lockdown made this year quite strange. It felt long in parts, but it has definitely flown by, looking back on it. Yeah, it’s been an interesting 11 months.

Adam Smith:

As a result of that, we, of course, never actually met face to face. I’ve seen you on the end of a computer, but we’ve never had the chance to meet. I think a lot of people who haven’t met me in the last 18 months, thank goodness, suddenly discover I’m much fatter than I appear just because you only ever see my head and shoulders.

Adam Smith:

Well, thank you very much for coming back to join us today, Morgan. To get the ball rolling. Maybe for those that haven’t been listening or weren’t listening 11 months ago, could you give us a recap on what you did before you came to UCL, and what made you choose dementia and this course?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, I was a student at the University of Glasgow. I studied psychology and neuroscience for my undergrad, but my main interest had always been in mainly dementia, but neurodegenerative diseases. I knew that I wanted to do a post-grad. I knew that I wanted a master’s to figure out what exactly I was interested in, what career path I wanted to take. I started looking for master’s degrees that focused on my areas of interest, and then I came across the master’s degree at UCL in dementia.

Morgan Daniel:

I came across that quite early in my studies, so I think I was only in my first or second year of university in my undergrad that I decided that this was a course I wanted to aim for. Yeah, now obviously I’ve nearly finished that. Yeah, from Glasgow to here, it’s been a journey, but yeah, the course obviously is something I’d had planned for quite a while, so it’s nice to finally make my way through that.

Adam Smith:

That’s quite planning ahead. I mean, if you were early in the second year of your undergrad, and you’d already decided that this was what are you going to do, does that mean you’ve already, I mean, we’ll come to this as we talk, but does that mean… How far ahead, just out of interest, have you got your life planned out?

Morgan Daniel:

I think I’ve had my life fairly planned out from before I even reached university. I was applying for my undergraduate degree when I was at school knowing what area I wanted to go into, and I think obviously that can change when you start your undergrad. I think when you start at university, you might be interested in one thing, and then it totally changes down the line, but I was quite lucky that I knew I wanted to go into some sort of area of dementia, neurodegeneration, having studied biology at school, and it’s never changed. That is exactly what I was interested in when I got to my undergrad. I’m very organized, but particularly when it comes to these five, 10-year plans.

Adam Smith:

Well, and being able to adapt as well. If you’re a new listener or one of the many people that only listen to the podcast and don’t actually visit our website, I should let you know that we’ve been following Morgan over the last year and Morgan’s been writing blogs for us every month just to give us a look at what life is like at UCL, studying for an MSc and some of the challenges you face, what kind of things you learn, did a Twitter takeover as well to talk about a day in the life and things.

Adam Smith:

Your first blog was a basic introduction, and you’ve also written about how to decide if a master’s is the right choice for you. You covered some very personal topics around the practicalities of moving from Scotland to London, the homesickness, and imposter syndrome. You’ve written some very helpful guides on tips and tricks for effective studying, how you approached writing up your dissertation, how to get some hands-on experience. Then, most recently, about your overall experience of online learning and how that’s changed as a student.

Adam Smith:

Thinking about it, I guess, even the people who are listening to this now or are thinking about doing an MSc next year or even the year after might still be affected by that. I think most education courses seem to be suggesting that they’ll have these hybrid models in future, so that might come up. Tell us, your experience has been anything but normal given the pandemic. What does your average week look like, though? Because I think this might be particularly helpful for anybody who’s doing an undergrad right now who just wants to know what to expect when they go to grad school.

Morgan Daniel:

Obviously, this year hasn’t been what I had expected when I planned my master’s years ago, but I think I still have tried to make the most of it, and it honestly wasn’t as negative as I expected it to be. There was definitely still a way of making it more structured than I thought it was going to be with online learning. My average week, it depends on what point of the year I was in but when I was in term time and first and second terms before the summer I had classes. I had quite a lot of contact areas on my course specifically, and that would vary in how they wanted to organize our classes. For some of them, we had videos that we had to watch beforehand, and then it was a Q&A session that you attended or for some of them, it was a live lecture.

Morgan Daniel:

My week was mainly made up of preparing for my lectures, preparing for any classes or tutorials, watching any videos that I had to, and thinking of questions I might want to ask or things I might want to go into more depth in during the lecture and the Q&A session. Then I tried my best to stick to a nine-to-five schedule. There was obviously times that would run over, and I’d be working outside of that, but I did try my best to stick to nine to five, Monday to Friday, just to keep it a healthy balance. My week was mainly work during normal working hours, work on my assignments, and things like that. Sometimes that would run over into the evenings, but then I tried to keep my evenings free to exercise, see friends, and that sort of thing.

Morgan Daniel:

It wasn’t as unstructured as I expected it to be, particularly during term time. It was you do have stuff to be getting on with during the day, and you do have classes to attend, and then come the summer it’s now into my dissertation writing period, so I still have meetings. I still have supervisor meetings and lab meetings to go to so that does provide a little bit of structure during the week.

Adam Smith:

So there’s a significant talk component then in those first couple of terms. I mean, it sounds very similar to undergrad in that respect then. You go to classes, you learn stuff, I guess, pre-pandemic, but for you, it was videos and questions and some live tutorials.

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah. I think pre-pandemic, it was all on-campus mainly around Queen Square, so you were in live lectures, but I mean, honestly, there isn’t that much difference between being in-person for live lectures to being online for live lectures at the moment. I’ve found obviously that it is different in that you don’t see your peers, but in terms of actually interacting with lecturers, I honestly think I preferred the online lecture format. But yeah, it was. It was quite full-on. I mean, there was weeks where you had more contact hours than others, but you did have quite a few classes each week, so it was very similar to undergrad in that respect at that point.

Morgan Daniel:

The only real differences that it’s an area that’s so much more specific to what you’re interested in, so there’s maybe a lot more passion involved in what you’re actually learning and the teaching, and you do probably spend a lot more time doing extra reading and preparing materials and stuff like that than you might in your undergrad. There is a few differences in preparation and stuff, but in terms of actual teaching and timetables, it really was no different to my undergrad.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, I get that. It’s kind of that more deep dive specifically into the topic. Great. I guess though, it must have been slightly frustrating. I mean, I know you said you liked the online bit. I’m sure that wasn’t just because you could wear pajamas all day, but surely you then… You could have been anywhere. I mean, you’ve been adjacent to campus, but could you have been just at home doing this?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah. There was people learning from all over the world. There was people learning from America. There was people learning from different parts of Asia. It was quite strange. You had classmates that were staying up late at night to listen in, or your classmates that were getting up really early. It was really strange and that was something that I did struggle with at one point during the year was I’m living here, but I really could be living at home. I could be doing this from anywhere. I could be choosing to live somewhere else. It was quite a difficult thing during lockdown, especially.

Morgan Daniel:

I think that’s one of the benefits for a lot of people of online learning was that they could live at home, or they could live wherever they wanted to, whether it’s with family, with friends. Yeah, I was based very close to campus all year, and unfortunately, I didn’t really get to see that much of campus. It comes with flexibility, but you do miss, I suppose, the feeling of that I actually go to this university, or I actually go to UCL. You miss that feeling sometimes when you weren’t on campus.

Adam Smith:

Yeah. I can understand that. I mean, it sounds like you had the… I’m going to say the worst of both worlds because it’s not like you were on campus, so you got to have the social scene that goes with being on campus, and you also didn’t get to disappear at home and have meals cooked for you and your friends nearby instead. Was that quite isolating? I mean, how have you coped with that?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, I think it varied a little bit throughout the year. I’m quite close with my family, so it was a really difficult decision to make to move to London because I knew that there was the potential that I could do it at home, and it might be a little bit more difficult, or I might miss out on a few things, but I knew that was an option.

Morgan Daniel:

It was nice being on campus for when there was a few opportunities to be there. We did have some in-person classes and journal clubs and things like that at the start of the year before Christmas before COVID really hit a second peak. So we did have in-person classes, which I was quite lucky to be able to go to and a lot of people in my course did actually move to London for the first semester, but come second semester, a lot of people chose to stay at home.

Morgan Daniel:

I was still here because I actually worked in a job here, so I had to stay here. But yeah, it was. I think I would have regretted not giving it a shot and not having my chance to be on campus and see the university that I was going to, make use of the study spaces, and just make the best of a bad situation. Yeah, I do think there was potentially benefits to staying at home as well, so I don’t blame anybody that did it from their [inaudible 00:13:40] bedroom.

Adam Smith:

No, no. I suppose you still got to experience that year of living in London, particularly I think for somebody who’s moving from elsewhere in the country, the idea of coming and having a year of living in London is quite exciting. I guess you’re making up for it now that restrictions are being eased off. I think even just being able to go for your daily run around some famous parks and passing places in the scene and being in that space helps you be in the mindset of learning, which you might not have had in quite the same way had you been at home.

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, I think if I’d been at home, the master’s might have been a lot more difficult. I think there was actually probably less distractions living independently in London and yeah, it was nice. Every so often when I was maybe losing sight of why I was here, of what I was doing, I would take a stroll down to Queen Square. I’d grab a coffee in the local area, and I’d go to the library and realize this is probably where I should be, and it is actually a good place to learn from. My grades are probably quite thankful that I lived here throughout lockdown, and I am quite thankful that I’m now living here during summer when we’re coming out of lockdown.

Adam Smith:

Talking about learning, have you learned much? I mean, you knew a bit about dementia before I assume you came here. How much have you learned in the last year?

Morgan Daniel:

I thought I knew a bit about dementia before I came here, but it turns out I was barely scraping the surface, really. It’s been something I’ve been passionate about for a long time, but I just think there was so much that I didn’t know and the chance to learn from so many experts. I think I’ve probably learned more about this than I remember learning through four years of university for my undergrad. There’s been so much information packed into one year, but it hasn’t really felt overwhelming. There was maybe times before Christmas when I had exams that I was overwhelmed with how much information we’d taken on, but at the end of the year, it’s felt like it’s flown by. I’ve taken everything on. It’s been a really interesting course, but I have learned so much about different subjects as well.

Morgan Daniel:

We’re quite lucky that you can choose different modules, and you can… It’s a little bit of flexibility in what you choose to study and the dementia master’s, even though it is an MSc in dementia, it doesn’t just focus on dementia. You do learn about other neurodegenerative diseases and I think it has helped me to not narrow down what I’m interested in necessarily in terms of pinpointing something, but it’s shown me that actually, I’m interested in a lot more than just, for example, Alzheimer’s disease, which I was interested in when I arrived.

Morgan Daniel:

I’m actually now interested in a lot of different areas, so yeah, it’s been great. It’s probably been more than I hoped it would be, to be honest. I didn’t realize how much I would learn and how useful it would be, so I’m really glad that I had the opportunity to learn from the staff at Queen Square and to make the most of that.

Adam Smith:

I mean, I work for UCL as well, so I’m probably biased, and I’m sure other universities are amazing and cover this equally as well, but I think that is one of the great things about UCL is that there is so much going on in every possible area you can imagine. There’s lots going on in Huntington’s disease and FTD and then PCA and things like that, and everywhere you go you bump into different individuals in different groups that are doing something absolutely unique, which I think is fascinating. Back to the basics, what exactly does the course cover, then?

Morgan Daniel:

The course gives you a general overview of different neurodegenerative diseases and the clinical neuroscience behind them and then delves into the practical side of that. We learned a lot about the different diseases, different types of dementia in the first semester. Then the second semester we had the opportunity to delve into more of the current research and the new research that’s emerging.

Morgan Daniel:

A lot of that is emerging from experts that are at UCL, and they’re at Queen Square, so there is a lot of world-leading experts here, so you are learning directly from them about their own research, which is quite exciting. Then learning about how you might deal with these neurodegenerative conditions and different dementias when it comes to the clinic or when it comes to diagnosis and hospital-based stuff. Yeah, it was really interesting to learn from a wide variety of staff as well and their perspectives and how they work with dementia. I came into this thinking I might learn from a few doctors here and there. That it would be mostly researchers, but we’ve learned from people that do full-time research.

Morgan Daniel:

We’ve learned from PhD students. We’ve learned from neurologists, occupational therapists, physios, speech and language therapists. Yeah, there was a much more wide range of staff that we learned from than I first thought as well. I think it’s given everyone a really good overview of how multidisciplinary it is and different aspects of dementia. It gives you more of an insight into why you’re actually studying these things as well because you do learn from patients, so you get interaction with some patients, which actually we still got this year through an online format, so I was really grateful for that. We learned a lot from patients and how it might affect them and how it might affect their families.

Morgan Daniel:

It really is like you learn a lot in a lot of different areas, and it’s really good for narrowing down what you might be interested in and narrowing down maybe what kind of research you want to go into if that’s your thing. Whether that’s wet labs, dry labs, clinical, it’s great for that as well.

Adam Smith:

That’s exactly what I was going to say, I guess because then lots of people do MScs at various career stages. I guess one of the natural progressions is from an MSc to go on to do a PhD, and it sounds like the way this is taught gives you a fantastic opportunity to see all the different elements and to learn from inspiring people who are going to probably try to sell their areas, whether that’s biomarkers or looking at languages or communications problems or whatever it is, they’re going to give a chance to inspire you and encourage you to follow through on that field and whether you’re studying for your MSc in Bradford or Scotland or Hull, or Cambridge, Oxford, wherever you are, I guess it’s going to be the same in those places too. Each place probably has a particular interest as well.

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, it’s been a great place. I think there’s a lot of people in my course that want to do different things, but there’s a lot of people that do want to do a PhD, and it’s a really good opportunity to meet the people that you might potentially want to do a PhD with or if it’s not necessarily with them, they’ll probably have the right contacts that you can take a look into and learn more about. It also gives you the background that you need if you want to go into research or a clinical career. It gives you the background in statistics and research methods.

Morgan Daniel:

I thought I knew enough about statistics coming into this master’s. I did not. I did not know half of what I’ve come out knowing and the practical-

Adam Smith:

Are you an expert in coding now?

Morgan Daniel:

I cannot believe how much I’ve improved in less than a year. I mean, don’t get me wrong, my undergrad, the university that I went to was very, very good for stats and for teaching a bit of coding, but I think the actual chance to do it yourself and do it with big projects has been great. Yeah, it does teach you a lot, and it prepares you for whatever it is you might want to go on and do.

Adam Smith:

That sounds like a brilliant topic for a future blog, by the way. We’ve not had enough people write about coding. I don’t know if it’s because they find it quite hard to share that in the written word, perhaps. I mean, it sounds like you’re doing a great job of selling this for UCL. If you’re listening, we do take sponsorship money. We should, of course, add that, I mean, I’m sure anybody who’s looking at MSc, we do actually have on our website, a higher education directory of all the MSc and PhD courses that you can do across the country, and you’ll find that each university quite often has something special that they do.

Adam Smith:

In Bradford, they do amazing work on dementia care mapping, and I think other places will be stronger on the neuroscience or on the clinical side of things. I think if you have a look at that directory, see if you can find what you’re looking for. I think all the prices are pretty much the same. I don’t think they’re very… Maybe aside from the cost of living in different places perhaps, and if you’re overseas, and you’re not in the UK, of course, the UK is always very welcoming. Where there are many overseas students on your course, Morgan?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, there was, actually. There was quite a few people. There was people who potentially had been living overseas their whole life or there was people who had maybe been from somewhere in Europe and had gone and studied in America, for example, and then come back to the UK to do their master’s. There was. There was people from all different nationalities. It did mean people getting flights home were flying out to all different places, and we were tuning in on Zoom and seeing loads of different backgrounds, but yeah, lots of different nationalities.

Morgan Daniel:

I think that’s one of the good things as well about doing a master’s in this kind of field is that the staff are from lots of different places, loads of different backgrounds in terms of teaching staff usually as well. It’s been good to have quite a mixed cohort and to meet people from different parts of the world. Coming from Scotland, which is quite small, it’s been nice to meet a wide variety of people.

Adam Smith:

Great. So if you’re overseas, come and do a year of full-time master’s in the UK and you can base yourself in amazing Edinburgh or Glasgow, you could be over in Cambridge, Oxford, up in Manchester or down in Exeter or Southampton. All of these places are doing master’s courses and of course at UCL as well. Do have a look at that directory. I’m sure there’d be something for you and give you a year of living here, and maybe you’d be persuaded to stay further.

Adam Smith:

Of course, hopefully, it’s not all been work. Have you managed to socialize a little bit at least? I’ve seen of course your Instagram pictures. It looks like you spent a lot of time sitting in parks and there might have been a little bit of alcohol.

Morgan Daniel:

Definitely not as much as in my undergrad, but that’s part of growing up, I suppose. Yeah, it has been a totally different experience to my undergrad. I think it’s probably going to be a different experience regardless when you move into post-grad studies rather than undergraduate, but it has been different. It’s been good obviously moving to London and getting to explore a new city, but I was quite lucky when I moved that I had a job here, so I actually met quite a few people through my job. If it hadn’t been for that, it might have been more difficult living in London during lockdown and moving not knowing anyone.

Morgan Daniel:

I think the one thing that I’ve realized about London as well is that the chances that if you bump into somebody, and you don’t have… The chances are you’re going to have a mutual connection. The city definitely doesn’t feel as big as it actually is once you get to know a few people here and there, you will have mutual friends and stuff. It has been lucky having a job that allowed me to meet people and I lived in student halls with lots of students. Unfortunately, because of my job, there was a different dynamic there. I was in very much a wealthier position in those halls, but it was a really good opportunity to still speak to people every day, socialize and just have that interaction rather than just being stuck in my bedroom all the time on Zoom. It was nice to actually see people in person.

Morgan Daniel:

So yeah, it’s been nice meeting new people, and I’m quite lucky that I’ve had a few friends move to London as well recently, so it’s been good to get out and do a bit more socializing and see a bit more now that things are opening up again.

Adam Smith:

Well, so you’re incredibly hardworking. I mean, so you had the halls job, you’ve been studying, and I know recently you’ve been working in the NHS as well, doing… Is that as a care assistant?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, I’ve been a healthcare assistant, or I’m sometimes called a nursing assistant. I think a lot of people know it back in the day as an auxiliary. I’ve had a few jobs. I’ve done my master’s obviously, and then I’ve worked as a resident advisor in student halls, which is sometimes known as a live-in support assistant. Then also I’ve worked on the NHS on the bank, so they’ve both been pretty flexible jobs to be honest. One of them takes place on-call overnight so luckily if not, too much happens, you get to sleep through most nights, and then obviously the other one is Bank Work$. It’s just choosing when and where I want to work, so it has been quite flexible, but I have been keeping myself busy that way.

Adam Smith:

Has all this prepared you for the next step? What does come next? It sounds like you’re well-prepared, whatever that is.

Morgan Daniel:

During my master’s, at the start, I was really still figuring out what exactly I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to continue with a career in research in some way, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to combine that with a more clinical career. I went in thinking I would just do a PhD and I would just do full-time research, but I came to the conclusion probably a third of the way through the year that I really wanted to do neuropsychology, having learned from a lot of neuropsychologists, having that been a big part of the chunk of my course. I realized that’s what I wanted to do, but I was very reluctant to admit that to myself at first because to do that, you have to do clinical psychology, which is very, very competitive.

Morgan Daniel:

I was putting it off for a while, but I came to the conclusion that I do want to try and do the doctorate in clinical psychology. To do that, I’ve been using part-time jobs as a way of gaining work experience at the same time. Obviously, the benefit of having a part-time job and having some money come in but also using that for my future work experience. Everything that I’m doing at the moment, it’s tailored towards gaining entry to the doctorate in clinical psychology and getting a bit of experience working with patients and things like that.

Adam Smith:

Before we started recording today, we were talking about the things you had and hadn’t gotten to do, and we were talking about how you’d finally gotten the chance to go into a lab, which of course has been the big gap in the last year is not having the opportunity to spend time in the labs doing experiments, using the kit and having exposure to that side of things. Do you think if you’d had that, that might’ve influenced you more?

Adam Smith:

I mean, are you pushed towards this because you haven’t actually had the lab work this year and if you’d done more of that, you’d have gone, “Wow, I love this. This is amazing. I’m awesome at pipetting, and I like the stuff that whizzes.” Do you think that would have been different?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, it was actually today though I was in the lab for the first time, just before we recorded this podcast. I got a chance to get into one of the big labs just below the dementia research center next to UCL. It was exciting. I mean, it’s the fancy brand-new equipment and the stuff that I’d never seen before, and it was great getting a chance to use it and that feeling when something actually works as you’re going through experiments, that’s great. But for me personally, I knew that I had always wanted to work with people, so I knew that I wanted to work with participants in research and that I was very much a people person when it comes to research, so I didn’t want to work in wet labs.

Morgan Daniel:

I had known that for a long time, but I think there is quite a lot of people in my course who do want to work in wet labs, or they’re considering that field, and they did feel like they were missing out this year in not having labs. Especially because some of the dissertation topics that should have been wet lab-based had to be analyzing all data or analyzing new data, but it was just the analysis side of things. It’s a shame, obviously, that this year we’ve not had the chance to get into wet labs, but I do feel obviously quite lucky that they’re doing what they can for us now that things are open again, and that we’ve got less restrictions that we can get into the labs for a couple of days.

Morgan Daniel:

They’re really focusing on building as many lab skills as they can in the wet labs in this couple of days so that at least we’ve got that to put on the CV and to move into research. We have a better idea of what we’re doing, and finding our way around the different microscopes in a wet lab will be great.

Adam Smith:

You just have to hope that any employers out there that are looking or hiring for their PhD students next time are going to be understanding of this and accept that people haven’t had the same experience that they might have had over the course of the year. We talked on your project there. I don’t want to spend too long on this. What has your dissertation project been about?

Morgan Daniel:

I been working in the Weil Lab at UCL with Dr. Ramona Weil. I’ve been looking at Parkinson’s disease dementia. Like I said, I commenced my master’s thinking that I was interested in Alzheimer’s disease, and I’ve ended up all over the place really with what I’m interested in, but I’ve been looking at Parkinson’s disease dementia so whether or not we can predict the development of dementia in Parkinson’s disease using online visual tests.

Morgan Daniel:

It’s a long-running longitudinal study. It takes place across four years, and it’s quite a large study as well. It’s across over 30 sites in the UK, and it’s been running now for a while. It’s been running since 2016, 2017. I’ve jumped onto the research and been helping with the testing and stuff like that, and then analyzing the data across a couple of years. It’s the Vision in Parkinson’s Disease study that I’ve been working on. There’s a website for that if anybody wants to read more into it, there’s a website for it. But yeah, it’s been really interesting. It’s been a great opportunity to work in a lab for the first time so to attend lab meetings and stuff like that, and learn from other people who are maybe researching slightly different areas of it, but all around the same topic.

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, I’m just finishing up my dissertation at the moment. I’ve got a first draft, and I’m just editing that. It will be interesting to see the results across the four years. Once the longitudinal data’s been collected, it’ll be interesting to see any changes across those four years, but it’s a really interesting field and vision tests and Parkinson’s is quite a new thing. It’s quite novel research and there’s not much on the topic now, so it’s nice to be part of a new area, and Ramona Weil’s leading the field almost in that area now, so it’ll be interesting to see the results coming out of that.

Adam Smith:

Does anything happen to the results of this? It’s not just like, oh, we’ll give them something to do just to keep them busy and to finish off their course. I mean, this is research of worth. It’s valuable. It’ll be used. Does it get published, or does it add to a wider body of knowledge?

Morgan Daniel:

I think that’s the big difference between undergrad and master’s level research is that my undergrad research, don’t get me wrong, it was really useful, and it was really good research to have done, but I think when it comes to master’s level research, you realize that you’re actually contributing towards what a lab is researching or what somebody is researching and that it’s actually of quite high significance, the work that you’re doing.

Morgan Daniel:

I think at the moment because it’s a longitudinal study, and we’re very much a baseline area at the moment in the analysis, there’s not necessarily lots and lots of significant results, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing to not have significant results at the moment, and it’s still important to acknowledge those. Yeah, depending on how well I do in my dissertation, we’ll see about publication and things like that.

Adam Smith:

You’ll get a footnote in the study.

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, we’ll see if I get a footnote somewhere, but yeah, no, I think it would obviously be great to have my research published. I don’t know if that’s going to happen, but I know that some of the other research that’s been going on with master’s students in the lab this year is definitely of the standard that should be published, and I think probably will be attempted. That would probably be submitted to different journals and stuff.

Morgan Daniel:

It’s been nice being part of a lab that there has been a lot of papers published recently, so it’s seeing the process of somebody writing up and somebody creating their figures and things like that and analyzing the data all the way to publication. It’s been really interesting. There is a shift I think when you get to master’s level of how important new research is and the standard that you’re writing at.

Adam Smith:

That’s great because that means it’s not just about you learning. That you are actually as part of your master’s contributing to the field, which is what people want. Very last question for you. Looking back now, is there anything you wish you’d known beforehand that you didn’t or anything that you would’ve done differently?

Morgan Daniel:

I don’t think there is anything I would have done differently. I think I’m the kind of person who doesn’t really, this is a bit cliché to say, but doesn’t really live with any regrets. There’s nothing really that I would change because had I lived at home, yes, it might have been comfortable. It would have been cheaper. It would have been nice to have like you said, hot meals on the table and things like that, but I don’t regret moving to London and trying to discover a new city. I’ve met lovely people when I’ve been here. I’ve gained great work experience in my time here, and I really have learned a lot, and I’ve been very lucky I think to live near campus and still get to experience being here, so there’s nothing really that I would have changed.

Morgan Daniel:

The course, if anything, exceeded my expectations, so I’m very, very glad that this is the course that I chose to do. I don’t regret choosing to do a master’s and particularly this year when the job market was really, really tough anyway, I don’t regret making that decision to do a master’s years ago. I think it was just lucky that’s what I wanted to do. So there’s nothing really that I regret.

Morgan Daniel:

The only thing that I think I would have done beforehand is practice my coding before I got to my master’s, because I’m fine now. I’m in the swing of it, but just that learning shift where you’re moving from coding for the purposes of doing a research methods class to actually coding for your own research and for quite big datasets, I do wish that I’d been a little bit more prepared for that and just the time that it takes get used to it, but that was probably the only thing really that I wish I had prepared myself for.

Morgan Daniel:

I think other than that, I was quite happy with the standard of work that I’d done beforehand and I think I was quite prepared in terms of my knowledge. To be honest, you learn so much that it’s very difficult to prepare for this kind of learning. Yeah, there’s nothing I regret and nothing really that I would change.

Adam Smith:

Well, thank you very much, Morgan. It’s been great getting to know you and working with you over the last year. You have one or two more blogs left. I think I’ve got one at the moment that’s got to go out. Is there another one after that?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah, there should be a blog in September. We’ll see. There might be more than one or two coming up. We’ll see what happens, but hopefully, I’ll still be able to keep in touch wherever I move into next.

Adam Smith:

That’s what I was going to say. We’re recording this in August. It’ll come out sometime in September, so I guess by the time you’re listening to this, go and have a look at Morgan’s blogs where there might still be another one to still come. Do keep us up to date on your progress. I hope you’ll come back again and let us know how you get along and how the next stage pans out because I know you’re looking for jobs and next courses now and if anybody’s listening, and they’re looking for a clever, newly graduated MSc student, Morgan, are you in the market for a job?

Morgan Daniel:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

Do you want to… I’ll give you a… Come on, you’ve got a 30-second pitch to any potential employers, on-the-spot elevator pitch.

Morgan Daniel:

Please. I would love a job coming out of this semester. Yeah, I’m job hunting at the moment. I do have a few interviews and stuff lined up, but just not being too hard on myself. It’s very difficult to get a job at the moment. Research is… It’s difficult to find the right fit and to find the job that’s right for you. I do think that things will fall into place where they’re supposed to. It’s always been that way. That’s something that I do very much believe in, so I’m sure I’ll find the right job at the right time.

Adam Smith:

Well, we wish you every look in that, and in all seriousness, Morgan’s bio and all her blogs are on our website and that includes details of her Twitter and contact details if you want to reach out, or you’ve got something you think she might be interested in.

Adam Smith:

If you’re at home thinking maybe I could do an MSc. You totally could. Whether that’s grad school in the U.S.A. or here in the UK, there are so many unfilled positions. We recently reached out to all the institutions running MScs to check how full they are, and there wasn’t a single course that came back and said they were full. Definitely do consider applying. Dementia really does need more researchers, particularly people from Black, Asian, minority ethnic backgrounds. There was published research last week from the AIC that talked about there’s an under-representation of people from those backgrounds in research as well. It really makes a difference if the researchers encouraging those people to participate in studies are also from the same background.

Adam Smith:

So please consider a future in dementia research in one of the MSc courses. You’ll find details of all those on our website. Please do take a look at Morgan’s blogs. They all come with narration, so you can hear her reading them out loud, something I’m sure she’s loved doing in the last year. You’ll find all of those on Dementia Researcher website, but also on our blogs podcast as well. Do go and look it up.

Adam Smith:

I think that’s all we’ve got time for today. Thank you very much again everybody for tuning in and Morgan, thank you very much for joining us.

Morgan Daniel:

Thanks for having me. It’s been great this year. It’s been great interacting with everyone, and thanks so much for everything and yeah, it’s been great to be on the podcast again.

Adam Smith:

Thank you very much, Morgan. Please, everybody, remember to like, subscribe and review our podcast using the app that you’re in. Thank you everybody again for voting for us in the People’s Podcast Awards. Thanks. Goodbye.

Voice Over:

Brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society, supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

END


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