1) Lately, I've gotten really quiet again with my blog updates. The reason behind this is I have found a lot of things to keep me occupied. On Aug 1 (Tues), I began my second research project at Beaux Lane House, Division of Population Health Sciences, RCSI. For the past few days, I've been working on two separate projects. The first is under my Principal Investigator, Professor Kathleen Bennett. We've been trying to analyse data from the "BREAST-PREDICT -Uncovering pathways from population drug exposures to breast cancer outcomes", the Irish Cancer Society's first Collaborative Cancer Research Centre. We'll be comparing the data obtained from the questionnaires with the TILDA (The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing) studies and looking for patterns. As of now, very little (to none, actually!) research has been carried out on prevalence of comorbidities in breast cancer survivors in Ireland, so it is really important that we have our data collected.
2) As you can imagine, moving from the labs to the statistics/calculations side is not an easy task. I've been through an insane crash course on how to use the IBM-SPSS software for statistical analysis. Frequencies, variables, confidence intervals, crosstabs - it just feels like A-Levels all over again. Not the best feeling in my opinion haha. Also, actually learning how to utilise Endnote to securely store all the literature related to my project. I'm sure all of us medical students will remember having that one Endnote tutorial, but I personally found it challenging to the point that I didn't use it for the project (we used Cite This For Me - there, I spilled the beans)...
3) And all of that is only the first project. The second one is under Dr. Caitriona Cahir, senior postdoctoral researcher fellow at the Division of Population Health Sciences. Me, along with San (2nd year med) and Dzana (final pharm) are involved in a research study, on prescription medication in older people carried out at Beaumont Hospital. The aim of this research is to gain a better understanding of medicines management in older populations after discharge from hospital. My role in this (for now, at least) has been preparing the questionnaire packs to be completed and sent back to us by post. That involves a lot of tedious work, printing out consent forms, writing addresses etc.
4) All of that, in addition to having to write the abstract and prepare the poster for my first summer research project (the one in the labs), has been more than enough to keep me occupied for the past couple of days. I feel the coming weeks will not be any less boring, and I eagerly await the new experiences (and challenges) that may come my way. Thanks for reading through this particularly long blog post, and have a great day. Cheers!
I don't have a picture of Beaux Lane House yet,
so this nice night view of RCSI should suffice for now :)
Today's special at AK Henry's
(I've actually forgotten what it's called XD)
