See, I said I liked making my life more complicated than it ever needs to be..

Since I have an estimated year to go on my PhD I've been thinking about my career, or rather lack of one so far. Sometimes it feels like everyone I graduated with has moved on and grown up so much, whereas I'm still in the same place, in the same lab as I was 3 years ago. Not that I regret doing a PhD (I'm not quite *that* sick of it yet!), but I would be in a very different place if I'd decided to go into industry after finishing my undergrad degree.

I am sure that I want to stay in research when I finish. This is the part of my PhD I enjoy (and yes, that is just as well really). I've also liked teaching undergraduates in labs over the last couple of years. What I don't like about University research is there's never enough money to do exactly what I would like to do, I think it's possible that I'm deluding myself that industry would be any different. If I want to stay in academia I need papers. My grand total of papers at the moment is zero. I have results which I could publish but I lack the confidence to do this because I'm working on my own and I suffer from being a perfectionist.

So far, not so complicated. However added to this I want to go work in Australia for 18 months sometime within 2 years of graduating. So I ideally need work experience here to put me in better stead for when I turn up there looking for a job.

And and and! I'm doing something I never would have imagined even a year ago; I'm living with my boyfriend. Eek cohabiting, this makes things more complicated and ties me to the Nottingham area for the foreseeable future. So any job I apply for after finishing my PhD needs to be commutable from Nottingham, and industry research jobs around here are few and far between. This pushes me back in the academia direction. I just need to ensure that I'm doing that because it's what I want to do, rather than because it's convenient. And then back to what I'm struggling with at the moment; is it academia I'm fed up with, or is it the University of Nottingham? I've had a good time here, but I think I'm just getting a bit bored starting my 8th year here.

Plus my supervisor is transferring to Malaysia campus on Monday. I'm trying to view this in a non-disastrous way; after all my driving instructor emigrated to Cyprus the day after my driving test and I passed that no problems!