coolohoh | Of spare time and further studies (Reply)

Ironically its at work when I have the most time to browse LJ. Like in the mornings when I reach office really early. Or even if I'm not so early... Work is supposed to start at 8:30am, but most ppl come in around 9:30... my lab exec starts work around then too, and I don't see the need to enter the lab any earlier myself so... that means I have an hour of 'free time' on my lovely big screen comp. Which means I can browse LJ, forums, etc... And often when I fail to find anything interesting to read, I end up creating new posts and entries. And regretting how I'm at work and unable to continue working on my half done (been over two months!) TV review... But by the time I get home I'm mostly too tired to do anything but lie in bed and use the phone. Last week I didn't use my comp during the weekdays at all! I surprise myself sometimes. But I guess last week was kinda tiring. For my leg at least. Went to the career fair on Tues and Friday with my sups. And while the Tuesday fair turned out to be pretty boring as usual, Friday's saw Duke NUS participating, and they kinda gave me hope. The exhibitor said they viewed additional activity/skills on equal weightage with grades, so things like work experience would definitely be helpful. So that gives me renewed hope for my quest to get a PhD. So I gotta do well in my work, and i'll need to get recommendations from my sups too. Duke NUS requires what... 3-5 recommendations. So yup, work experience will definitely be helpful for me here. Its been a short two months, and I've only started lab for like a month... so I'm hesitant, or rather restraining myself from saying that I don't like this field of work I'm doing. But sadly that's what i feel atm. I don't see myself doing this waste water treatment stuff for my PhD and beyond. Not unless there's a way lot more bio, even then I think I'd prefer to work with eukaryotic cells rather than bacteria cells and fermenters. Yeah, I see myself going back to doing cell culture in the future, and Duke NUS certainly has a lot of those kinds of research. But its good. I'd never realise that i want to do that, like really, really, want it, till i did this job of mine. Plus, getting to learn to use all those instruments is definitely going to give me an advantage over my peers. After all I already know all the cell culture techniques. They know them too, but I know TEM and GC and what not that they don't know. I'd love to learn confocal and NMR too, there's a confocal here, so hopefully I'll get the chance to pick it up in the future. Confocal is used in biological applications ALOT, so it'll be a huge advantage if I can pick it up. Huge advantage VS fresh grads that is. Yeah work experience will definitely give you that. Haha... I've set duke nus as my dream institute now... i don't know if I'd actually end up there, but I'd definitely work towards getting my PhD. I'll definitely be going back to a more life sciences kind of thing for my PhD, and in the mean time my goal shall be to learn about the operation of as many machines as possible... and there are a ton of expensive equipment in here. First TEM i guess. Thinking about all the stuff I'm getting to learn gives me a lot more confidence in getting into a PhD program haha... hopefully whoever i wish to work with in the future will be similarly convinced...