Setting Out on a PhD Journey - FindAPhD Scholarships Winner 2016

Every year we award thousands of pounds to new postgraduate students as part of our FindAPhD Scholarships. This year's winner of our top £5,000 award was Anh Hoang Le. Anh has now started his PhD at the University of Glasgow's Beatson Institute for Cancer Research. In this first blog post he shares his first impressions of PhD study.

I’m no extraordinary person.

One could say that I’m hardworking, but, up until now, my life has been pretty calm and boring. Every day during my undergraduate degree, I got to go on two trips. Don’t get too excited just yet! One trip to my lectures and one trip back to my room. Yeah!

Occasionally the return trip would deviate as I like to take the longest route back home: wandering the city, singing out loud every song from my favorite Taylor Swift playlist.

But I do have a dream, a big one! A dream that one day I could help cure cancer.

My name is Anh, I’m twenty-one years old, and this year I’ve started my PhD at the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow.

Originally from Vietnam, I moved to the UK in 2012 to do a one-year college course in London, before beginning my degree in Biochemistry at the University of Bristol.

It was a huge change to relocate across the continent to study, and it didn’t stop there. Three years later I moved across the country to Scotland to begin my postgraduate training.

With a long-term interest in Cancer Biology, combined with a love for cell migration that I picked up during my final year at university, I decided to come to the Beatson (well-known for its research in this field) to learn more about cancer metastasis.

I was super excited! Who wouldn’t be eager to begin a new chapter of their life in a completely new place, with new challenges and new experiences waiting?

I knew the lab I’d be working in is an amazing place with amazing people. Better yet, I’d now get to work with them and do real science – finally! I’d have my own projects to look after. I’d have my own questions to seek answers for.

It was all very exciting, but also a little imposing. I felt like I was about to begin an adventurous journey down a deep jungle river! It turned out that there were a few rocks along the way.

At first, I was humble. In fact, I was too humble. I started my literature reading two months before my actual PhD began.

As quick as a boat with holes, I was in danger of being drowned by the amount of knowledge that I had to take in. I spent hours and days, trying to read and understand every single word in each paper that I got from PubMed.

I was paranoid because the words seem to slip through my brain like oil gliding on the water! It’s just the nature of my personality, I supposed. I was scared that if I didn’t stuff all this knowledge in my brain now, I would lag behind others, disappoint my supervisor and my project would be a disaster. 'Amateur!', some people might think.

It didn’t stop there. Having completed quite a few summer internships I thought I would be fairly comfortable with most laboratory techniques. I was wrong!

The first experiment I was taught was an assay to measure how much the cells degrade the surrounding matrix environment. It took three days to finish and I was clumsy.

Then, I had to use a microscope to obtain pictures from my samples. I could barely remember a thing from my previous lab experience. Next, I tried using software to analyse my data. It was fairly simple, yet I just couldn’t figure out how it worked.

Looking at other people in the lab, they all seemed so confident and efficient, and there I was, a slow clumsy PhD student sitting around not knowing what to do most of the time. 'My fellow PhD students must be so good at this!', I thought.

Later that week, all PhD students from my institute were invited to go on a trip to the North of Scotland. This was when I started to realise what a PhD was really about.

During this trip I got to attend a series of workshops about the work and life of a PhD student. I had a chance to talk with people from my year and from previous years and at various stages of their PhDs.

After two days at the event I began to realise how similar we all were!

It wasn’t just me who was clumsy. it wasn’t just me who didn’t know what to do all of the time. Other people felt the same too.

I got to see other students’ posters and projects. These talented people gave me so much inspiration. Through them, I learned that behind these amazing results lay countless hours of work. Some people had even needed to start experiments again after almost two years without results.

I’ve now realised that this is all part of the learning process. Everyone needs to develop as a PhD student. The professional experimental designs and near-perfect technical practice that you see in other students’ work is actually the outcome of a constant process of training and acquiring new knowledge.

To get there you simply need to give yourself some time, give yourself some space to adjust and allow yourself to adapt to the new environment of postgraduate research. Soon your work will be as impressive as your peers and you’ll be the one impressing new students.

Doing PhD is hard. It was never going to be easy. That is why you have experienced people around to ask questions of and to learn from. I am no extraordinary person, but that doesn’t mean I am lagging behind anyone because I know that I am not alone - and neither are you!