In February 2020, news was spreading that the World Health Organization (WHO) was about to declare Covid-19 a global pandemic. It was the morning of my interview at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh for a PhD in one health and infectious disease, which was due to start in September 2020. I quickly added a picture of a test tube labelled ‘Coronavirus’ to my interview slides (see Figure 1). In the interview, I said something along the lines of ‘…and with news this morning that Covid-19 may gain pandemic status, infectious diseases are still a major and relevant threat to health across the globe, reinforcing the importance of the One Health agenda’. Little did I know that a few months later, the only reason I would be leaving the house was to handle and process similar-looking tubes in full PPE for hours on end.
Some pretty major events on both an individual and global scale happened following that interview. Most excitingly for me, I was offered and accepted a place on the PhD programme the next day. The next month (March 2020), the UK went into lockdown. I sat my final year undergraduate exams in my bedroom and held a ‘graduation ceremony’ with my mum and dog in the garden. By summer, I was working with one of the UK’s largest Covid-19 testing laboratories. It is fair to say that the year did not go as expected for most of us. However, I feel fortunate to have had valuable opportunities from an otherwise terrible time that are likely to shape my career path for years to come.
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