Over the past few weeks all my work has been focussed on one thing and one thing only: The looming deadline for my 7500 word dissertation on the research I have done over the past 7 months. I finally submitted it yesterday after a bit of back and forth between Jenny and myself with advice on what to chop and change and then after some formatting / binding issues (why double spaced? It uses unnecessary paper and looks worse!) submitted it both online via the NESS internal system and handed in two hard copies to the graduate school. This week I have also submitted an abstract to a conference in America (SMPTE) and have helped out with an outreach activity:

Some of the less well represented schools and colleges in the area brought their students to the university to give them a glimpse at university life to try and encourage them to go along. Because Newcastle doesn’t have a neuroscience undergraduate course the ION set up a stall/desk next to the boardroom where the talks were taking place after a talk on psychology – neuroscience PhD. Then any interested students came to talk to us about questions they had about life as a PhD student and what studying neuroscience was like and how to get into it. I thought I was well placed to talk to people about it because I’m actually mathematically backgrounded rather than psychology, biology or chemistry. Quite a number of students came to ask questions during the hour and I thought it was certainly a help to the students!

Now that the dissertation is submitted I am looking at submitting the work as a paper to a journal (hopefully Journal of Vision, or something similar) and working on another paper regarding the illusions at the Leicester conference I went to, as well as working on a presentation for the final aspect of my MRES year. The beginning of my PhD is nearly here and I’m very excited to get straight into it!