In school, lab usually means following a set of procedures to come to an expected result. While we usually propose a hypothesis for what we expect, ultimately the “correct” results for almost every “experiment” are already known. For me, both the joy – and frustration – of my experience come from breaking away from this paradigm.
As a researcher, it’s very exciting to look at something and realize that you are the first person to realize some conclusion. It might be (and almost always is) minor, but you take pride in the knowledge that you’ve contributed something to the world. But at the same time, working with something novel often means that you need to pioneer and refine the experiments you need to prove your conclusion. In this sense, coming up with a hypothesis is only the beginning of a long – and sometimes arduous – process. While sometimes the first experiment you propose works, you often need to repeat things to get the full, accurate, picture.
