In January, I secured a job role which is due to start in July as I finish my PhD. The job is directly linked to my PhD, working on clinical trial management within infectious diseases. I planned to secure a job at least a few months before finishing my PhD so there would be no delay on progressing my career, or added stress whilst finalising my thesis.
The role I secured is a PhD graduate scheme, whereby I will be placed onto an intense training scheme to co-ordinate project timelines and progress towards management as I gain experience. I am really looking forward to starting and being able to take the knowledge I have learned during my PhD into a real-world situation working on clinical trials. This will be a rewarding career and I hope to make an impact with my work.
In five years, I hope to be managing teams working on clinical trials for infectious diseases. My future job role provides me with the opportunity to specialise in a medical sector and I hope to become an active participator in the world of clinical trials within microbiology.
One of my proudest moments so far was having my research published. Almost a year of work towards refining the microencapsulation process and then applying this to bacteriophage microencapsulation culminated in a successful research paper, which can act as a platform for scalability. In addition to this, having the opportunity to work on an in vivo experiment with the University of Glasgow. Being directly involved on a murine study, whereby the treated group of mice displayed exceptional recovery results, made me extremely proud by showing my research has real proof of concept for treating humans.
During my PhD, I have learnt that I am more resilient than I had previously thought; being able to face problems during experiments without giving up and working extremely hard to find the solution.