My Story

Pre-PhD: Decisions, decisions, decisions 

I was fortunate to find a topic I was passionate about in my second year of medical school: neuroscience. I’m interested in how the brain goes wrong in psychiatric disorders. In my third year, I intercalated into a combined neuroscience and psychology degree. 

A laboratory research project was a mandatory component the course, and my project mentor – a postdoc at the time – was a skilled scientist and teacher, tenacious in his pursuit of scientific knowledge. He instilled in me an appreciation of science as a day-to-day pursuit: some successes scattered amongst many more failed projects and dead ends. But he always said that if you are passionate, the successes make all the failures worth it. It was his mentorship and my enjoyment of wet lab work that spurred me on to apply for the MB/PhD programme. 

I filled out the application towards the end of my third year and was invited for interview just before preclinical finals. The interview itself was pretty daunting – I was faced with a panel of seven or eight (it’s a blur!) clinician-researchers from different backgrounds. They asked two types of questions in the interview: detailed, specific ones about the research I had undertaken; and more general questions about why I wanted to pursue a PhD, why now, and the steps I had taken to show I was serious, such as contacting potential supervisors. 

After a month, I heard back – I had been offered a place! During the following year – the first year of clinical studies – I had to decide on a lab. I followed up discussions with several of the lecturers I had approached previously, and gradually whittled down the options to a shortlist of three potential labs. I investigated these more thoroughly: I spent a couple of days at each lab and attended lab meetings to get a feel of lab dynamics. I spoke to PhDs and postdocs about life in the lab, both academically and socially. The most important factor influencing my decision was how clearly the supervisor defined my project, and how the project fitted in to the overall direction of the lab.

I also wanted a supervisor who was experienced from two perspectives: first, from a publishing perspective – I wanted a lab with a record of publishing in high-impact journals. Second, from a supervision perspective – I wanted a PI who had supervised several PhD students before me.

PhD: There and back again 

My PhD used animal models to investigate the physiological and behavioural functions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex – a brain region heavily implicated in psychiatric disorders. Looking back, my PhD is a story in three parts, which broadly align with the first, second and third years. 

The first year was about acquiring skills: learning how to plan experiments, lab skills and data analysis. I was fortunate to join onto the project of a final-year PhD student, so I could learn skills whilst also getting my name on a publication. Thanks to this, I hit the ground running with my own projects. By the final few months of the first year, I had my first complete dataset and plenty of things to talk about in the first-year report. Having someone’s project to join helped with my own work, providing me with the ideal opportunity to acquire skills relevant to my experiments. 

The success of my first year was followed by the notorious ‘second-year slump.’ This year was the toughest for several reasons: my experiments were running into problems, the steady stream of results was running dry, and importantly my medic friends were graduating and moving on with their lives. They were preparing to be junior doctors, whereas I felt stuck.

Looking back, the reality couldn’t have been more different – my experiments were progressing (even though there were lots of negative results), I was learning advanced lab skills (including surgery and neuroimaging) and I spoke at national/international conferences. A post-doc commented that things often feel slower because I was becoming more efficient and completing my work in less time. A nice thought, with hopefully some truth! My supervisor was very supportive and made sure I had post-docs helping me with some of the most advanced experiments, including MRI and PET imaging. 

The final year was a combination of tremendous excitement but also significant stress. The experiments were working, data were being generated and we had results to write papers. I realised that resting on your laurels is not a thing in science – if you’ve got results, you’ve got to write them up quickly to remain current. Writing up a manuscript is an immense task, and for most of my third year I was balancing writing manuscripts, completing experiments, writing my thesis and preparing for the return to clinical school.

The MB/PhD puts a significant time pressure on you as a student because you want to have written up your thesis (or at least most of it) by the time you return to clinical school, which gives you in total only two years and 10 months to complete all your experiments and have a thesis to boot. Fortunately, my supervisor carefully planned out my transition from a PhD student who was in experiment-mode to one who was in thesis-writing mode by gradually transferring experimental responsibility to students and post-docs. 

Thanks to support from the lab, family and friends, I powered on and managed to submit my thesis in time for my return to clinical school. The papers inevitably lingered on (because of the lengthy peer-review process) but juggling clinical and academic commitments was manageable. My viva exam took place in October 2018, and I passed with minor corrections, ultimately graduating with my PhD in April 2019. The PhD journey, of course, doesn’t end there – and the reality is I am still involved in my lab, offering advice on experiments and helping to write up other papers.