This week has been MENTAL. Monday afternoon I drove to my cousin Sarah's hotel in Hertfordshire, where she was very kindly putting me up while I visited my two potential PhD supervisors at Rothamsted. The journey took HOURS as I was held up on the A14 by not one, not two, but THREE broken down lorries, one of which I nearly broke even more in my haste to get off a roundabout. Finally arrived at the Hardwicke Arms, just in time for a catch up chat, some drinks, a burger and off to bed for a sleepless night worrying about what the next day would bring.
The next day brought an awful lot of fun. I arrived at 10.30am, parked my little flowermobil and met potential supervisor number 1; David, and very quickly got down to business discussing Robert Downy Jr's role in the new Sherlock Holmes film. The other team members and head of department gradually trickled in for cups of tea and the conversation turned to, err, more relevant things like what on earth I was doing there, what the project might involve and the direction in which I'd like to take it. Turns out the project would involve a fair amount of identifying dead insect samples from previous years' trapping, mingled with some time in a balloon with a big net and a stint over at Cardiff doing the molecular side of things, identifying aphid parasitoids with the aid of some very sexy molecular techniques. The guys were lovely, talked very easilly (although for some reason I stuttered through Biology and RAMBLED through folk music, films and the best way to entertain 2 year olds) and took me for lunch, which I have yet to pay them back for, at a super good Thai restaurant/pub in the village of Harpenden. I also had a tour of the farm, where I would be doing my own sampling, the labs, where I might keep pet aphids, and the manor, where the PhD students live in catered accomodation and, from what I can tell, pretend to be freshers. The day was really relaxed, the guys were super lovely and very human (at least by academic standards) and I came away feeling like, although I might not know a great deal about parasitoids, and neither did they, we'd get on really well and I'd have no problems fitting in.
I'd brought a ridiculous amount of reading with me, so that night I settled down in the bar at the Hardwicke and tried to plod through plant defence papers for the next day, my head still full of aphid-parasitoid interactions and my tummy still full of Thai food and Sarah's sausage and mash. Needless to say, I didn't sleep awfully well on Tuesday night. I hadn't finished the reading (mostly because I'd attracted interest from the locals who, in turn, had inticed me into a debate about Bt crops), I was overtired, and due to excessive time on the road every time I closed my eyes I was behind the wheel on the A14.
Wednesday saw an even earlier start with me arriving at Rothamsted at 10am, to be met with the first of FOUR power point presentations that I sat through that day. The supervisor, Kim, and co-supervisor Jason (who I have mutual connections with at Birmingham) were clearly very excited about the project and keen to impart on me everything they had discovered so far, and I in turn was surprised to find myself making feasable suggestions about the direction the research could go in. It helped that I already have a background in plant defence genetics from my final year lab project, so although I have avoided plants, fungi and molecular biology for the best part of my academic career, I was surprised to discover that I knew, and cared, about the things they were discussing. The other 3 presentations were from 2 PhD students and a post doc, with whom I had lunch and spent most of my day. It gave me a chance to ask a few questions about the supervisors which obviously I couldn't do in front of them, engage in a bit of student banter and to some extent guage the quality of life of a Rothamsted PhD student. They all seemed pretty happy, and almost human. Kim, it transpired, was rooting for me to do her project despite having another candidate visiting the next day which meant ultimately the decision was up to me. Shucks.
Sarah had Wednesday off so when I had finished at Rothamsted I drove back to her house for an afternoon off with Chinese take-away, her over excited dog and Pulp Fiction. I opened a fortune cookie and it read "today is the tomorrow you are searching for". OK. I would like to get something straight. I don't read horoscopes, or particularly believe in or care about fortune telling of any sort. I'm very much one for making my own decisions and I guess I see God as fairly non interventionalist. However, when it comes to big life decisions that I'm having trouble making, I pray. This was a big life decision. I had prayed. Whether God was even listening is a whole other kettle of fish, as is the question of whether he would choose to RSVP via a medium as ambiguous as a mass produced fortune cookie. I'm still not sure if the cookie swayed my decision, or if it made me even more careful about making it for fear of being swayed. Either way, at 4pm on Friday (my self imposed deadline) I was still nearly ready to toss a coin, except that I'm no good at that so someone would have had to do it for me.
Then Rachel finally rang. I'd been waiting to talk to Rachel since Wednesday. She's the other half of my brain, and I'm not entirely sure if I'm even capable of making a decision without first consulting her. If God has ever put anyone in my life to help guide me, that person is Rachel. Rachel isn't very convinced by fortune cookies either, but she thought I should do Kim's plant defence project. She agreed with me that it fitted in nicely with my final year lab project, and that ultimately, however much I claim to be an ecologist, I like nothing better than a nice clean lab and a good bit of sterile technique, and to grow plants and talk to them. Dead insects are just fine, but they don't talk back.
So ultimately I made my decision based on a fortune cookie and a little help from my best friend. It maybe wasn't the most sensible way to do things but it was so close that I may not ever have been able to choose by myself, and I still think parasitoid wasps are the coolest creatures on Earth. I have a phone conference tomorrow about the interview for funding, and am therefore missing Rachel's first dress fitting, which I guess is what happens when I take her advice!
This post is way too long, and I am super tired. I didn't even get on to my night out in Brum on Friday with my long lost friend Becky, the fact that I miss Matt and Tom stupid amounts having had lunch with them on Saturday, Shelley and Simon's new baby girl and equally cute 2 year old boy, or my 7 year old niece and our night in watching Hannah Montana. I suppose these are all stories for another day.
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