Expanding Nitrogen Acquisition in Plants: From Academia to Entrepreneurship (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So I'm Lucy and I work at Bangor University and I'm looking to expand the bottleneck that was created by proteases in order to increase nitrogen acquisition in plants. Yeah so yesterday we had some entrepreneurship training so a professor from Lancaster came in and he talked about how setting up a business and the business models you can use that which is really interesting for people that don't want to go into academia to look at how you can actually fit you know what your research is into maybe developing a business out of it and then with Nick Skinner we've been working on sort of behaviors looking at how to interact with people in the workplace and how that can be better for you because you know how to get the most out of people with regards to their behavior. Yeah definitely it's not really something you get trained on especially in university on your undergrad it's not something that really comes into the curriculum and so being able to get the opportunity to do it as a PhD student it's really good especially as you're in more of a work environment so you have more of the work relationships that you've got to deal with you're dealing with more personality types and that so yeah. Yeah I always have sort of thought about reflecting of what I've done especially with the work that I've done and I've been with presentations after I do presentations I always try to think like how would I do it better so it's good to have that process reiterated and how that is important to improve on your presentations and things like that yeah. Yeah definitely I'm more looking to not go into academia so either industry or policy so I think this is really helpful to me because it's it's taken aside from the research and going more into the industry business side of things. And so yeah it's really helpful for me to sort of have a look in that sort of side and how I could work in there but still using my research so yeah. Yeah definitely like especially the entrepreneurship stuff you know that's more working in business and business side of things which is where the industry would fit in. I didn't really know much about entrepreneurship at all it wasn't really something I looked into and never really thought about being able to do it. Yeah I think it's really helpful to create my own business so it's definitely given another pathway that's a possibility of being able to do. It didn't occur to me before that it was something that was possible especially coming from a very scientific background you don't really feel that fits in with creating a business. Yeah I actually think it's a really good idea to have the training in the early days because obviously when you get into year two and year three of your PhD you're very bogged down with the actual PhD research. Doing a lot of experiments you don't really have as much time to come and do these training things so because I'm mainly focusing on writing my lit review and coming up with ideas for specific research questions and experiments it's a good opportunity to sort of one take a break from that and two it can sort of help influence you know what my research actually would be about because if I'm thinking like oh I want to go and do this in the future I can actually change my research now rather than you know you're finding it out in your own research. Year three and you're like oh it's too late now because I've already done everything basically.