Finally done with the presentations and poster for my Honours project. Had been a crazy 14 weeks with the project and I sure learnt a lot. To be extremely honest, I barely understood what is phosphorylation before starting the project, and the first 2 weeks was a mad rush trying to understand what I’m doing. The practical part is easy, but the theory isn’t. Luckily, I managed to understand the basic by the second week to finish my ‘grant proposal’ assignment, and gradually learnt more along the way.
Definitely not an easy project. Just like my final year project back in Polytechnic, there are many failures and repeats that pissed the shit out of me. But this time, I have to do it all alone. When I’m tired and annoyed, I still have to suck it up and do it. This is the only time I miss doing a project as a group. ๐๐
But thankfully, everyone in the lab are very nice and helpful. They really helped me out a lot during my 11 weeks there. My supervisor even helped me look through my poster on a weekend. No words can describe how grateful I am to be allocated to such wonderful lab.
The weeks after the end of lab sessions are a rush. First, we had one week to prepare our poster and slides. To give a timeline, we ended lab on week 11. The poster was due on Monday, week 13. Slides and project abstract was due on Wednesday, week 13. The exam was on Friday, week 13. Viva was on Tuesday, week 14. The poster presentation was on Wednesday, week 14. Competitive viva was on Thursday, week 14. It’s basically a mad rush.
Viva
I was really disappointed with myself for making horrible slides for my viva, and I even found a major typo in the slides after submitting it. I believed that my presentation went well. I have confidence in my 7 minutes talk. But I absolutely have zero confidence with my Q&A and I knew I screwed up. Hopefully, it wasn’t too bad and could still average out. ๐โโ๏ธ
Poster
I am very proud of my poster. This is the best poster I made in this lifetime. I put in a lot of effort in it. I even went back to discuss my poster with my supervisor a few time during week 12. Might not be the best, but definitely a huge improvement from last year.
My first assessor is a friendly lady and she was really nice. She told me she liked my poster, which gave me a lot of confidence. After she left, I waited for probably more than an hour for my next assessor. Each assessor had a few students to assess so I guessed he started from the back (?) and I became the last student he assessed. It was to the point that I was afraid that he has forgotten about me lol. But he did come over eventually and was really nice too. Both of them were really friendly so I wasn’t nervous at all. I believed that I’ve done my best.
Went for dinner after the poster presentation because a friend is going back to Singapore for winter break. I was quite reluctant to go at first because I had not prepared for the competitive viva the next day, but I still went LOL.
They only informed me that I had to do the viva on Monday, which leaves me 2 days to prepare?! What kind of nonsense is this?
Competitive Viva
It was such a last minute thing that I only start to memorize the script hours before the presentation. Woke up at about 7am that day to memorize and my presentation was at 10am. I was still memorizing it when I got to the venue at 9:30am. Worse still, I was the second presenter. But everything turned out fine I guess because I won 2 prizes from it.
I swear to god that in Dundee, when I don’t put in effort, I do extremely well. But when I pour in my heart and soul, the results showed otherwise.
I guess I should just expect nothing in future. Might turn out to be good eventually.
I was late to the prize-giving ceremony. When I reached the venue, everything was over. To be honest, I thought I did fairly decent and that I would win something, so I was shocked when my friends told me it was over when I reached. I thought I didn’t get anything, so I was just focused on the food until the programme lead told me I won some prizes. I wasn’t even shocked. At that time, all I felt was “I know I deserved it”.
Could have done better if I had more practice, but oh well. Very satisfied with the results of my last minute work.
I can’t wait to give more presentation as a real scientist in future.
