Last time I was here was Feb 2018 and well lost of stuff have changed then (as you've probably noticed!). Things have been quite different for me too and I'm writing from Ireland of all places so things are going to be fun in this post :P This is kinda going to be dry blog post of such, mostly updates and an informal personal recap and self-reflection. Well lets start off from what's happened since Feb 2018 with a rough timeline; I've graduated from college, been in and out of a few labs, migrated from Singapore to Scotland and started my time in the University of Dundee. Round September of 2018, I finally left the Chen lab where I'd say that the majority of my training has been and started at. I decided to move on due to wanting a change of pace in the nature of work I had been working on, feeling a stagnation of self-improvement. I really wanted to continue the amazing level of independence I had been given yet looking for mentorship outside of the set of skills I had been exposed to. No doubt the skills I had been exposed to were excellent and I'm still no where near mastering them, I felt like I needed a different set of basic skills before I can revisit the higher-order skills I had yet to have obtained. In Dec of 2018, I had moved on to the Poh Lab in NUS SynCTI where they had worked on optogenetics for blue-light activated promoter design. The lab culture was very different but still gave me the independence I craved. Unfortunately it seemed to me mentorship was scarce and work culture was kinda not very fitting especially given the cultural and language differences. What was valuable though was a mentorship opportunity, except it was turned on its head and I was the one mentoring a student for his final year thesis in his bioengineering degree. This was probably the highlight of the experience at that time but probably staged the disaster that is the next lab I joined. In June 2019 in joined the Chng lab where I started work on Mycobacteria biochemistry. Dr Chng was a great friend of Dr Chen from my first lab and had heard from Dr Chen about me, giving me the independence and trust I had wanted once again. The huge downfall for me here was my arrogance in skill and burn out from work. Whilst my confidence in skills has found me great value here, it had also been a downfall in my social interactions and learning amongst coworkers here. The work culture here is drastically different here with all of the lab being Singaporeans. I didn't understand how some of my words came across as arrogant and insubordinate to my seniors there. My arrogance also inhibited my ability to take in new methods of doing experiments, owning to "having always done this like this". Dr Chng was a great mentor and was very patient with me. We had a personal bond owning to my time in the Chen lab and honestly I had let him and myself down. Very truthfully I was tardy at my work, feeling reluctant to face my coworkers and the same repetitive experiments everyday. This was horrible attitude of mine and reflecting on this makes me feel ashamed of the researcher I had come to be. If this gets out to my coworkers and Dr Chng, I hope to be able to show that I can be better. Looking forward to a better me and a more productive me, I set foot in the Hirao Lab in March 2020. Dr Hirao was the director of the institute of bioengineering and nanotechnology and worked on xenobiology projects based on synthetic nucleotides to create synthetic DNA with 6 base pairs. Here I had learned about the work that was ongoing and their loopholes through a meeting prior to my official first day in the lab and I had strived to be the best, I worked day and night on a satisfactory project proposal. I remember distinctively getting an email responding to my project proposal at 11pm while watching a movie with my girlfriend at the time and immediately got excited and made edits right there and then. What I had come to realize however, was the hierarchical nature of the lab culture here where students were at absolute subordination and no independence was given. In fact, I was not treated as a worker here, rather a student. I was taught...mostly everything I had already known like a curriculum and definitely felt like this was not for me. I never got to see the light of day for that project which makes me sad till date. I was drilled with experiments to be done exactly their way. Sounds familiar huh? No availability was made for personal style of work and that made me very uncomfortable If bells hadn't already rung when I said March 2020 though, you'd be living under a rock because that's when the peak of the pandemic hit! Also crazy right? An article in 2020 and only at 800 words in did we start talking about Covid-19. Work from home started just at the end of this month so my nightmare lessened here. Fast forward to September 2020 and I finally migrated from Singapore to Scotland to begin my Undergraduate degree in Molecular Genetics in the University of Dundee. I had a scholarship to begin in my third year and therefore I'm somehow a senior now! Remember Ireland? Well, I'm celebrating Christmas with my wonderful flatmate in her home here and it's been absolutely amazing. I have seen so many firsts; my first pig, cow, sheep, horse ride, waterfall, fireplace, dishwasher and many more! Now...about writing. As you can see here I've had......a few......topics I have chucked aside and have never finished. Some of them with one liners of inspiration and some of them with walls of text. First thing that's coming up is an article on the question of "what's life going to look like moving forward from Covid-19?" and "Why has all the past pandemics not been as bad as this?". These questions have been directed to me in the past few months whenever someone knows my line of work and I think I have a take that hasn't been voiced out as much so i'd love to share it, along with the sudden inspiration to write about it. Aye so that's it for what I have to say about what's happening in life right now! My experience here in Ireland has really helped enrich my roots as a farmer (I should probably write a blog post on that!) and strengthened my curiosity as a researcher. My first winter has been superbly rough but maybe now I'm breaking the mold and maybe I'll start writing more and beat procrastination! With that said Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone!
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Hey everyone, it's been a while since I have written anything here and if you are reading this you might notice there are two new sections: Publications and Blog.
So first, to sum up why I have not been wiring, I have simply been too busy with work and school to be able to write. I would still love to write more here as I start to have a bit more free time, but for now, I am unlikely to be able to push out any more articles but I may be able to blog a bit here and there to give a more casual update about my life as it goes, hence the new blog section. In the time I have been inactive, I have been training in the sciences as well as general writing of which I am going to make changes to my article formats which you may notice to be extremely amateur. I have been specializing in the area of synthetic and molecular biology of which, as well as my research work, has allowed me to make my first publication which you can be directed to in the publications tab. It's a short genome announcement, nothing very impressive but a start for more to come. That pretty much sums up the things that has been going on in my life and hopefully, I'll be back to writing soon. See ya'll and stay curious! |
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