What a week!!!

I have grown accustomed to the largely monotonous and repetitive life of a PhD student recently. Wake up, go to Uni, set up experiment, experiment fail, go home, sleep, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. But this week has been different.

There is significantly less Kung Fu in science than I was led to believe. Turns out its mostly repetitive bench work.

On Monday I woke up and checked my email and found that I had received notification that the Journal of Bacteriology had accepted my first (and probably last as I plan on leaving research after my PhD) scientific paper. Now I just have to find a way to keep it from the prying and critical eyes of the blogosphere. Jimmy don't like criticism, even of his very preliminary data :).

Later on Monday I was contacted by the Faculty of Science at my University (The University of Adelaide) because they wanted to offer me a job! My PhD scholarship was due to run out in June, I think, so I had been looking around for something else to earn money with and applied for an Assistant Lecturer position. I can now officially call myself an Assistant Lecturer and since the position is part time it should allow enough time for my thesis to keep ticking over.

Pretty good week so far and Tuesday and Wednesday were spent preparing and organising myself for my new position.

Then, on Thursday, COSMOS magazine ("Australia's #1 science media brand") posted online a feature I had put together about a month ago. You can find it here and please 'like' and 'share' it as much as possible. This is my first foray into adult, serious, science writing and is a little more formal compared to what makes the blog. My only problem is that is no ability to add references so if you want them just let me know.

Seriously everything. It's an awesome magazine and the online content is awesome.

Friday was my last day in the lab (kind of, I still have one itty bitty experiment to do and I will still have my 'office' in the lab) so we all went to the pub. Any day that includes a pub visit is a good day :)

Finally, this morning I awoke to an email from Chris at The Naked Scientists alerting me to the fact they had published online another of the features I have written. This one can be found here and, as above, all the 'likes' and 'shares' are much appreciated. I really enjoyed writing that piece so I'm glad it got used somewhere.

The Naked Scientists. Good logo or best logo?

If you don't know about The Naked Scientists you should. They produce a wildly popular podcast which is awesome and should be listened too. I've also met Chris (the founder and one of the presenters) twice now and he's a really nice guy.

As I said its been a good week and technically its not quite over so maybe I will win the lottery tomorrow, although I'm sure you have to buy a ticket to be in the draw. Fingers crossed anyway.