I was always interested in objects but had studied the history of art, which is really only just fine art and paintings and nothing else.

Then one of the professors on my BA, Sarah Teasley, had moved to the Royal College of Art. She taught art history but incorporated a history of design method, which I thought was interesting.

Because of this, I came straight here to the RCA after my BA. It also caught my attention that it was a two-year course, rather than just one. You get one full year to write a dissertation and you get to do more in-depth research. I felt this was better preparation for going on to a PhD.

There aren’t many History of Design programmes around, especially ones in partnership with the Victoria and Albert museum. The programme connects you with the V&A, and through this, you make further connections. I ended up interning in the Asian department for over a year, helping the senior curator with cataloguing on the China Design Now exhibition. By being on this course, you get strong academic training and knowledge of what’s possible, which leads to what you do next.

My work has been case studies of the history of design of ephemeral, consumable objects such as Chinese ink sticks or Western medicine in China. I was the only one who dealt with Chinese objects, studying the Asian strand of the course.

I’m indebted to my parents for funding me throughout the course. I did get a travelling grant from the Gardiner Travel Award to subsidise my travel to Hong Kong for research. This is awarded to students studying the Asian strand of the course.

In March, I became a research assistant with the V&A for an upcoming exhibition on Chinese paintings in autumn 2013 – this is now my main focus.

I did two masters degrees – one in fine art and the other in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing and Jewellery, which I continued to do up until several years ago.

In between I worked in gallery education and on various art projects. Then I did an MRes London Consortium multi-disciplinary programme. This was a partnership with the Science Museum, Birkbeck and the Architectural Association. It was at this point I became interested in scientific images. I’m now studying the object from a scientific and design perspective.

Atomic study and investigation is about matter and how to represent the invisibly small and how this became iconography in culture and science. It was an advertised studentship within the RCA and the Science Museum. Coincidently, I was already interested in the culture of scientific images and their translation to design, and how this translates to other areas of culture. I grew up in a house where both my parents were scientists but I was interested in the arts.

In the first term, it was mainly induction to the programme and after that I threw myself into history of design reading to catch up. The research methods course brings all the research courses together. You can attend courses for CHS and go to those lectures too. 

Since I’ve been here, I’ve also started a seminar series called Meta Lab, bringing together theory and practice. This is student-led and is involvement in a topic explored through practice. The RCA really encourages things like this. It’s one of the best ways of learning.

With collaborative PhDs like I'm doing, things can happen really quickly. I interviewed in July and started in October.