• Question: what do you do as a phD student

    Asked by dear1avos to Larissa Chicoski, jadegray, Gemma C, Emma W on 3 Oct 2025.
    • Photo: Emma Weir

      Emma Weir answered on 3 Oct 2025:

      The idea of a PhD is to explore a novel topic in-depth and contribute to new knowledge.
      For me in the field of neuroscience/biology the topic was set by my supervisor (boss) but I have guided the project as I’ve learnt new things.

      On a daily basis, I do experiments and analyse the data, and based on my analysis work out what we’ve learnt, whether it worked, and what to do next.
      The experiments are very varied, I also spend a lot of time keeping my cells alive, going to talks, lab meetings, and doing admin!

Comments

  • Photo: melissau

    melissau commented on :

    Every PhD is different as the idea is to contribute to new knowledge and to train you to be an independent researcher. I spent about a third of my PhD working in a remote part of southern Africa working with people who use their horses to live on a daily basis or as transport animals (the roads are very poor and the area is very hilly so horses are a more efficient and cheaper way to travel than having a motorised vehicle like a car or a truck) I assessed their horses’ health and collected information from owners about how they cared for their horses in terms of feeding, footcare, medical care and the equipment they used when the horse was being used. I collected this kind of information several times over the three years of my PhD, and all of the information was collected on paper forms as we didn’t have electricity to power digital devices such as a tablet and collecting information online wasn’t possible since many owners couldn’t read or write and they didn’t have internet access either. Later on in the project I ran meetings with groups of owners to find out what issues they thought were most important for their horses’ health and to understand how they managed these and the problems they face in doing this. I transferred the information I collected from all of these visits into digital format each time when I returned to the UK (that took a long time!) and then I analysed the data using statistics and finding common themes from the conversations with owners. I also did some teaching of students at the university where I was based in the UK. I attended conferences to both learn about other people’s work and to do presentations of my own work to share what we were learning from the research. I also wrote several papers for publication in scientific journals to share the research findings.