Final Year Fast Approaching - Elizabeth Young

Final Year

As I enter my final year, I enter a weird vortex of calm and panic. Looking to future aspirations is exciting, but the impending doom of final year is real. Carpe diem, they say? I’m happy that my computational model (that has taken 2 years to function, thanks to all those “meaningful” learning curves) now has the fundamental physics in place. However, my next challenge with it is ensuring these fundamentals are sufficient in representing the pathology I’m investigating and knowing which tests and outputs are most relevant.

In Vivo

As means of ensuring that representation, I’m due to start the in vivo aspect of my project over summer. There have been supply and infrastructure issues that slowed the beginning of this process, but that’s just part of project management I suppose. However, I’m really looking forward to engaging with my project in the subject area best suited to my expertise - think of a hill versus a mountain (fluid dynamics is the mountain). I look forward to being able to bring all my ideas together to form my argument and justify my research.

Aside from work

Aside from work, some recent wellbeing training has proven more beneficial to my project than traditional knowledge transfer courses. I attended sessions that focussed on building resilience and tackling procrastination; both of which I didn’t feel I was particularly struggling with, but wanted to attend out of curiosity. Turns out, my concept of resilience was skewed and my ways of handling setbacks resulted in, unsurprisingly, procrastination. These sessions helped vocalize my perception of my work and made me implement techniques to tackle unfruitful processes. Namely, the creation of a learning journal and setting weekly, smaller process-orientated goals has boosted my confidence and given me a more driven perspective – just in time for final year!