A Day in the Life;Thesis at a company

If you are interested in Molecular Life Science master, you are probably also curious about how would be doing your thesis at a company. Is research done in the same manner? Are time schedules the same? Do I use my free time in the same way as I did while doing my previous thesis at the university?

For those that do not know, I am a double master student. This implies that I have to do two thesis in order to graduate for both masters. Luckily or unluckily I have the chance now to compare the differences of doing research at Wageningen University and doing research at a company. I am currently studying Biotechnology masters and Molecular Life Science masters. I started my second thesis at the beginning of January. Therefore, I already spent one month doing writing proposal, I handed in my project proposal and I am now starting in this new lab again. My company is placed in Utrecht but I still live in Wageningen, therefore I decided to drove my car from Spain to The Netherlands.

6.00 AM – Buenos dias Wageningen

After listening to maybe one million alarm clocks, I wake up and I directly go to have a shower. No matter in which moment of the year we are talking about, it’s still dark outside and luckily is not freezing. I will have a nice Spanish breakfast (pan tumaca in case you want to google it) or cereals with yogurt. After that, if I succeed with waking up at 6 (generally it turns out to become 6:40), I will run to my car to start unfreezing the igloo (thanks to the ruitensproeiervloeistof from action) which melts all the ice from the cristals.

7.00 AM – Driving to Bilthoven

My company is placed close to Utrecht. If you check in Goggle maps you can actually see that its placed only 40 minutes away from Wageningen. Let me tell you that in the Netherlands this is a joke as traffic jams are crazy. Unless you are driving on a nice mom Wednesday day where parking places are available and roads are empty, you can expect your trip to require double amount of driving time.

8.00 AM – Coffee time

As soon as I arrive to the company I take one (or most probably two) coffee and I open all my email accounts to keep up to date. Next to that, I open my lab journal and I plan my experiments of the day, keeping my week overview.

12.00 AM – Lunch time

I have to say, this is the lunch time but I never have lunch at 12.00, I generally take a Cup a Soup and an apple followed by a little break as I prefer to continue working with my already started experiments. I will check again my email and I will return back to the lab.

13.00 PM – Spanish lunch time

Now it’s my moment to have lunch, I will warm up my food and I will have a break to have my lunch followed by a cup of warm chocolate.

14.00 PM – Back to the lab

As soon as I finish my warm chocolate, I will go downstairs again to continue with my experiments.

16.00 PM – Wrap up

I am used to make a summary of the experimetns I runned and the results I got. I wrote all my conclusions on my lab journal and I check I have properly cleaned everything in the lab. Finally, I will check what experiments do I want to do on the next day in order to see whether I need to prepare something in advance. As soon as I am sure, all my lab stuff is properly organized and recorded, I will open the SCB-Sports overview to check whether there are still free spots for spinning and I will take my car to go back to Wageningen.

17.30 PM – Sport Centre de Bongerd

I will generally (I could even say always) park in the Sport Centre de Bongerd. If im lucky and there are still free bikes in the spinning lecture, I will join to that one. Otherwise I would do cardio in the gym and some fitness.

19.00 PM – Apple time

Once done with the gym, I will leave the gym with an apple in my hand and Ill drive back home. After parking my car, I will have a shower and I will prepare my dinner while my friends wait for me in the sports bar.

20.00 PM – Dinner time

Generally, I will have dinner with a friend. Once done, we will take our bikes and I will cycle to café Loburg or back to the Sport Centre de Bongerd. This time, our visit to the Sport Centre de Bongerd will not be for sporting but for drinking.

21.00 PM – Sport’s bar

Sport Centre de Bongerd also hosts the best bar in the whole entire Wageningen. I meet there with all my friends. We are probably the best and worst customers at the same time as we drink most of the beers but we also eat all the free peanuts.

22.00 PM – Time to go back home

After eating most of the available peanuts in the bar and enjoying a good Ayinger, we take our bikes and we drive back home. Unfortunately the day after I will also have to wake up soon to take my frozen igloo to drive to Utrecht again. Therefore I appreciate too much my sleeping hours (check for changes in a Friday routine 😉 ).