Hi All!! Having a wee bit of a panicky moment. I've just realised that I really haven't made any progress with my PhD work for at least three weeks now and I really need to be making some decisions, narrowing down my options alot and getting the practical work up and running :-( And I think there are a number of reasons why,

1. The areas that I'm studying are quite diverse and I have little experience in them but for my PhD they will both be important.

2. It seems like there is a huge number of considerations to look into before I should make any decisions about the practical work but it is impossible for me consider everything given my experience in the subject and time considerations. I'm really afraid of over looking something/ making the wrong decision and wasting loads of time and money.
3. Any decision I make regarding practical work will have majorimplications of the accuracy and relevance of the main partof my PhD which I won't be able to get going on for a while.

So basically, I sit at my desk everyday and write lists of things to do - the problem is that the same things keep coming up that I just haven't been able to do. Sorry all, I just needed to get that out. I am going to try to make myself concentrate hard for the next 5 hours and keep that squirmy feeling in my stomach at bay.

EV x

hmm, not sure about your field, but in mine these practical probs could be solved with a few cheap pilot studies with a small number of participants - might take a week to do, but would focus your mind and highlight any problems. E.g. I had a questionnaire study that had missed out vital demographic info.

And 3 weeks is NOTHING so don't get too stressed - breathe

Thanks Sneaks

I do intend to do some run throughs before I start the practical stuff for real but I am in science so even before I can do that, I need to buy equipment, chemicals etc. So the pilots will be more for adjusting test parameters rather than helping with their overall design. I'm just nervous about making the wrong decisions because of my inexperience in the area.

You're right though 3 weeks probably won't make too much difference, I'm just anxious to get it sorted so I can get started before Christmas and hopefully move on with the main part of my project hopefully by the middle of next year!!

Yes, keep breathing Ev and don't let the panic get to you. When you're at the planning stage it's always very daunting and I fully understand the fear of making mistakes when ordering. The truth is that there will be unexpected twists and turns in the road (I recently spent 5k on a custom antibody that turned out not to work for my intended application - oops) but that's all part of the process of research and there's rarely one perfect answer anyway.

Are there any specialist forums (or even tech support people at suppliers) who could give you the benefit of their insight? I recently spent months trying to plan the best way to do my experiments and found both these options useful. Or does anyone in your team have a contact that has used these techniques?

At some point you'll have to take a leap of faith and just see what happens, but if you've done your research and discussed the pros and cons with your sup then I'm sure it'll be fine :-)

Crapola! 5k??! Is your supervisor going to lynch you? I once spent ~£750 on a radioactive isotope which seemed outrageously expensive (thankfully the expt. worked). £5k is nuts :\

Luckily clogsie I have a gem of a supervisor who understands that these things just happen. That and the fact that he managed to convince the company they'd mis-advertised (which they had in a sense) and got the whole thing refunded as a credit ;-) Even my consumables are usually in 3-4 figures a batch so we have to wince and bear it in my lab.

Besides, any time I feel bad I just remember a good friend of mine who went on an industrial placement and managed to ruin a tube of antibody with the wrong dilution...... it was worth so much I don't dare quote the sum (but think the scale of a banker's bonus)