pogoism

Hello blog! I haven’t written a proper update in a while, so I thought I’d come back and see if anyone is still reading this. So, what’s been happening I hear you cry. Well, truth be told, not a lot. Which is mainly why I’ve not been blogging. The last few weeks have been coming up to the end of this year, which meant that I had a heckuva lot of work to do. Firstly, I had to finish off my thesis. Luckily, the bulk of it was the actual research, which I’ve been in doing in the lab since September so writing it all up wasn’t too much of a pain. The trickiest part was trying to write it all in science lingo, which I’ve never had to do. It was easy enough once I was in the mindset of it though. After submitting that a few weeks ago, I’ve been mainly concentrating on exams. I’ve got 2 exams at the end of the month, and then at the beginning of June I’ve got my viva for my thesis. I’m hoping that should be straightforward enough – a 10 minute presentation on my results followed by a 5 minute grilling by a panel.

Anyway, enough of that. Some exciting stuff has happened in the last few months. I got accepted onto a PhD at Queen’s so, provided I get a 2.1, I’m in Belfast for another 3 years. I’m really excited as it’s in the same group as I did my research project in, and I loved every minute of it. I’ve also been accepted to do a placement in Korea this summer. I’m going in less than 2 months, and it hasn’t really sunk in yet. I’ve no idea what to expect. I know very little about Korea, very little about the customs and what’s expected of me, and I certainly can’t speak any Korean. From what I’ve read, English isn’t particularly widely spoken there. Could be a steep learning curve! I did learn how to write my name though (릴리 조엘) and I’m getting to grips with learning the alphabet. When I’m out there I’ll be living in Daejeon and working for the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology.

So, yeh… Korea should give me some interesting stuff to blog about – something there’s been a distinct lack of in the past few months. Sorry about that…