What kind of colleagues do you have? Are there many at your stage or more senior?

If I were you I would arrange informal meetings with as many as possible, with the following aims:
- find out what they do, as it might help you shape some ideas around what kind of research is possible there
- to see if any of them might be suitable collaborators or at least provide any guidance and support on your your project proposals
- to see if they have been through this process themselves and can offer you advice as to how to go about it.

If the above doesn't yield anything, I would start small, come up with simple hypotheses to test on the basis of your existing data, and then let things develop from there.

I wish you well with your endeavors. However, it's not entirely clear why doing this as a PhD is necessary. Given your existing qualifications and research experience, why not simple do this as a research collaboration with the professor you identified?

Unless you're undertaking a major major shift in area, I would have thought the same end could be achieved by maybe taking a course or two and submitting a project grant somewhere?

I used to work with microarrays so you have my sympathies on the cost aspect! Realistically it is very difficult for a PhD student to do 'enough' experiments on the funding available.

Whether or not you get to improve your sample size, being aware of the limitations the size places on the interpretations is very important for when you write up (whether for papers or your thesis). No statistically significant findings may be due to under-powering the study. In contrast, detection of homogeneity or heterogeneity between your samples may be difficult to interpret without controls - how do you know that similarities/differences are related to the tumour (or tumour subtypes) and don't simply represent naturally occurring homo/heterogeneity across the general population?

Sorry if I am giving you too much to think about. I am familiar with your conundrum as I used to do similar work when I was a lab scientist and it frustrated me the way that I was told very small sample sizes were ok when I could see potential flaws with the approach. Either way, your thesis will be fine, but it may affect publications leading from it.

Well, it could also depend on whether you're doing hypothesis testing or hypothesis generation.Different study designs have different requirements with regard to sample size. Do you also have control subjects for your study?

If you google "how to determine adequate sample size for micro array" there are some helpful looking papers. A biostatistician with a lab focus will be more helpful than an epidemiologist in this scenario.

As I said, you ought to discuss this with a biostatistician. Whether or not 20 samples is adequate depends on the hypotheses you're testing.

In which case it might be worth seeing whether you can make overseas contacts who will let you have access to samples. Or see if they can be purchased from cell/tissue banks. Of course with permission from your supervisor.

It may feel intimidating to approach collaborators but it's actually an important skill for an academic career. There's a knack to it though, so seek advice.

Whether it is worth it kind of depends on whether you want this work to provide meaning just for the thesis, or have a wider impact. A study based on 10-15 samples has limited interpretability.

As others have said, it is unlikely to matter. Really. Do not waste any energy thinking about this. If it comes up in the interview, explain. If it doesn't, just leave it and negotiate afterwards if you are made an offer.

A week or two's shift in start date for a PhD rarely matters. You might even want to think about giving yourself a proper week off in between the two.

I've found a bit of a flaw with the private message interface. I open a message, read through it and then click on the button at the bottom right so that I can reply. (In the same position that the 'submit' button currently is on my screen right now). Only that's the 'delete' button, not a 'reply' button. To reply you have to scroll back to the top.

Twice now I've accidentally deleted messages when I wanted to reply. Perhaps it's just me being daft, but would it be possible for this UI problem to be examined? Possible solutions include moving the 'reply' bottom to the bottom so you are forced to look and choose, a trashcan from which you can retrieve accidentally deleted messaged, or a confirmation "Are you sure you want to delete this message?" type pop up.

Thanks

It's 'ok' in the sense that if your work is carried out well then it will probably be sufficient for a PhD.

It may, however, limit the ability of your work to provide real insights into a phenomenon. This in turn may affect the likelihood of publication.

I would advise consulting a (bio)statistician for advice on this. Sample size is partly contingent on the nature of your hypotheses/studies.

You don't mention what kind of samples you are seeking, but it may be that it would be possible to obtain a larger number through collaboration. If, for example, you are collecting patient specimens from a single hospital, you could approach potential collaborators at other hospitals to increase your collection rate. But to do this you should firstly check with your supervisor and secondly ensure that doing so is within any study/ethics approvals you have obtained.

While I sympathise to an extent, I think it's worth considering the plight of kids who do not come from backgrounds as supportive as the one you are creating for yours. Clearly, you understand the importance of education and are not likely to allow your children to fall behind because of time missed from school, but that is not something that all parents would do.

A close friend of mine comes from a background where education wasn't as valued as it was in my household. As far as I can ascertain his parents took the view that school was attended only for the minimum number of years and then you got out and got a proper job. That perspective is not in itself detrimental, but this was before the days of holiday regulations and they plucked him out of school for a two week family holiday right in the middle of the O-Level/GCSE period. As a consequence, he left school with very few complete qualifications, despite showing the potential to achieve them. It has had a detrimental effect on his career and, in my view, his confidence when it comes to applying for things. Had the regulations been in place at the time he would have been protected from the whims of his parents and would likely have ended up with a very different career path.

Your children have the privilege of parents who understand the importance of education; sadly, too many do not, and this legislation perhaps gives their education some degree of assurance.

I think it's also worth considering the POV of school teachers. If all parents were plucking their kids out of school for whatever reason, it would be likely to create an extra workload for them in having to deal with either catch up, or not being able to proceed with the curriculum as the class's knowledge would be at different stages. That doesn't seem fair on either the teachers or the kids who are present throughout.

I am sorry to hear your experience was not as you hoped. Nonetheless, congratulations on completing your PhD.

Your account does raise a few questions, though. Firstly, why does your self assessment conclude that you have no transferable skills, despite having a technical scientific PhD? Your experience has also given you *some* degree of interaction with industry, which would probably be beneficial to your PhD when looking for interesting jobs outside of academia. Certainly it might give you the edge over someone who only has academic experience. I would suggest getting an objective opinion on your skill-set as it may be that you are under-estimating your options.

Secondly, it seems that you have identified a potential barrier to pursuing an academic career, but casually disregarded the solution. If you are very keen to pursue an academic career, then I would recommend publishing from your thesis. Perhaps the content doesn't interest you, but it is an achievable means to an end. Would it be so objectionable to do this that you are willing to throw away what you originally aimed to achieve? If you expect that every publication will be on a topic that truly enthuses you, you may find an academic career path disappointing anyway.

Sadly there's nothing terribly surprising in this person's experience.

Are you trying to write a project proposal?

You yourself can narrow the question by telling us more about the project (Science? Humanities? Qualitative/quantitative? Primary data collection or secondary analysis?)