March 19, 2010
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I think perhaps I chose the wrong field of research. Biology is really difficult. Everything is alive/fragile/temperature sensitive/shock sensitive/light sensitive/etc. so much so that I sometimes wonder how anyone gets anything done at all. And today was a really terrible day for me in terms of little mistakes. Now I'm left feeling pathetic and drained.
First of all I got up at like 8:30 AM (mind you I have been getting up at noon) so that I could have a meeting with my professor. The meeting went relatively well and afterward I got started on what I had hoped would be my first successful day of research. I was incorrect. The day started off with me adding an incorrect enzyme to a particular mixture, thereby ruining its further usefulness. "Ah well," I thought and continued with the rest of the experiments, hoping that I could at least make sure my incorrect procedure still worked the way it was supposed to even if I couldn't do anything with it in the end. At this point I started mixing up a batch of gel, only to realize that it wouldn't work for the experiment I was trying to carry out. I threw my hands up and made a new, correctly mixed batch and pour it into a mold. Sighing, I carefully pipetted all my samples into the gel and got everything ready, and then turned on the machine that would run the gel for me. I walked away and started doing something else, but suddenly realized I had placed the gel backwards on the machine! I rushed back over and found the situation to be salvageable, flipped the gel around and went back to what I was doing. At this point I ate lunch, confident that when I got back I would have a gel that I could analyze and be proud of.
When I got back into the lab the gel was almost done and I went to the cabinet to get a container in which to stain it. Upon discovering that I had made a gel too large for any of the containers that were scattered through the lab, I again threw my hands up and went to the storage room to buy one. (I wondered to myself, "How does anyone stain these gels?" because people make them all the time. Maybe there is some hidden trap door full of large containers. I don't know.) I stained the gel and went to image it. Of course, my previous reactions hadn't worked and my gel was utter crap. I took some pictures and then started to remove the gel from the imager so that I could save it and show the post doc later, but as I picked it up it ripped in half, leaving me standing with a dumbstruck look on my face. I had specifically remixed it so it wouldn't rip... At that point I just wanted to cry.
And now I'm reading a book trying to figure out why everything went so wrong with my reaction. I'm getting so tired of failing. I'm not even doing experiments yet! I'm just practicing this for training! I can't even succeed at the simple tasks given to me as a training for later!!
I feel really defeated. I've got more cells growing to fail with on Monday.
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