If you want to try what contact lenses feel like, please feel free to contact me!
Yes, I'm in need of a lot more participants, even though not many people read this blog, or you can let your friends know if they're interested in trying contacts. No idea how we will be able to recruit our minimum target. We have to recruit around double the amount of people in a 'normal' 5th year research. You don't even come in for that long, and you get paid pretty decently as well.
Sort of drowning already even though this is our first week. If I had normal clinic, no way would I be able to do our research project. I bet ours is the most time consuming, even compared to ortho-k. It's quite difficult to schedule multiple appointment times and make sure the room is free, participant is free, and both of us are free.
Once we book someone in, we need to calculate how many days before we need to prepare the contact lenses: 1 day, 10 days or 30 days. 30days are the trickiest, because we have to prepare it and hope that the participant can come back in 30 days, if not....well, we will have to re prepare it.
Once we decide what day to start preparing/soaking the lenses, the solutions have to be changed everyday. So much pipetting. Pretty much it's like research is a full time job. We're dealing with around 540 lenses if we get enough participants. So for a 30 day lens, we have to change the solution every single day. Luckily we have someone helping us for a bit with changing solutions, but it's still a struggle to calculate what day we should start preparing the lenses whilst juggling when the participant is free to come in, as they are the number one priority. Aiming for 270 appointments, which is a lot, considering we're not at uni everyday.
In hindsight, we sort of regret choosing this project. Actually, our supervisor didn't know how much work was actually involved until we started. We wanted some lab work and clinic skills since we don't get patients this year which is good, but just didn't realise the actual prep is more time consuming than seeing the participants. And if we don't get enough, we don't finish our project...
Sometimes I wish I was more extroverted and had a bunch of friends to call upon. But friends aren't like databases and I'd prefer to have a few closer friends than heaps of non close friends (but for research that would be super helpful).
Slowly feeling better, but was still pretty dead this week. Been sleeping before 9pm this whole week. I even missed most of MasterChef because I didn't have the energy to stay up and watch it-that's pretty serious considering some season I've never missed an episode. Celebs catching up since research has become more like a full time job. I can truly appreciate the efforts PhD students put in. Some of them even stay at uni till 1am almost 7 days a week...No time to even blog about Tassie....
Aww so sad that you missed Masterchef! At least you can watch episodes online :)
ReplyDelete