Studying to obtain my PhD involved establishing a long-term selection experiment to study virulence evolution, and how it is affected by the presence of a host organism. I was given the study organism and host organism to use, but was able to design and implement the entire experiment. Once evolved bacteria had been obtained, I determined virulence phenotypes of both the total populations and a variety of individually isolated strains. This included overall virulence, expression of specific virulence factors, and SNP analysis. Achieving this fostered initiative, creativity, problem solving and both individual and collaborative work and planning.