The Half Decent Pharmaceutical Chemistry Blog

The REAL reason why I have dramatically reduced the number of posts has little to do with the fact that I’m working at my graduation thesis project. Actually, it has been a consequence of my quest for an interesting available project for the next year: before choosing whether to submit any application, you need to read as much as possible about not only the area of research involved but also on the group’s itself, and if invited for an interview, you need to prepare yourself properly. Let’s say the last months have been all but relaxing and stress-free.
Call it superstition but I decided to never mention my application forms for a PhD studentship. Even my family and friends had no idea what was really going on. Until now, when I’ve been formally offered one at Imperial College, London, that I have obviously accepted.

So, from October 2008 I’ll live in one the biggest, most chaotic, coolest and most exciting cities on the planet. To be honest, I have almost exclusively considered England for my PhD as I wanted to live in place where I could fully interact with the locals even outside the lab (where your English is generally sufficient to interact with colleagues and boss). No enquiry was sent to lovely places such as France, Germany (although I considered Switzerland), Sweden, etc., and, because I somehow wanted to remain in Europe (at least for the PhD), England looked the ideal solution.
Generally speaking, though, I have always wanted to become a PhD and to work at a project abroad, even before I realised what my main interests were, and always been attracted by the dear old Blighty (I guess many of you don’t know what this means, do you?).

I was interviewed by both Oxford (department of biochemistry) and Cambridge (the famous MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology), but we were both looking for something else. Anyway, I am going to dedicate a post to this as I’ve had radically different impressions about them: all I want to say, at the moment, is that I may still consider Cambridge for a PostDoc, whereas I sincerely doubt I’ll have anything to do with Oxford University in the future (although they still have to tell me whether I got the job or not).

By the way, I’ve managed to get what was at the very first place in my wish-list (by a large margin, indeed): a position at the Gene Regulation and Chromatin Group of the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre at Hammersmith hospital, which is part of the faculty of medicine of Imperial College.

The studentship is a 4-year Gordon Piller Studentship kindly provided by Leukaemia Research and offers a £16,228 annual stipend plus fees, with an allowance of £11,564 towards research costs. However, I hope you to believe money is the least of the reasons I find this project so appealing. I will certainly provide more details later on, but, to sum up, I just would like you to want it encompasses all my major interests in molecular biology.

Stay tuned: massive news to come soon…