“If you expect an experiment not to work, you’ll be pleasantly surprised when things work out.”
Though he did not use those words exactly, my mentor Jonny told me that when I was still a lab assistant making plates and sterilizing pipettes in the Jinks-Robertson lab. However, those words stuck with me, especially as Dr. G told us coming into BSURF that our project may not work. Jonny is naturally a sarcastic guy, but what he said encapsulates the fact that research isn’t like a lab in chemistry class where if you follow the instructions you’re sure to get an expected product. Things won’t always work out like you expect them to in scientific research, and if they do then you’ve lucked out. Thus, I don’t expect the project we are working on to be easy, but I do expect to gain valuable knowledge not only on lab techniques but also on what background knowledge has been used to formulate the experiment. I already feel like I’ve learned so much and it has only been one week.
Furthermore, I expect to make mistakes. Towards the middle of the week, I was working on a genomic prep of some yeast cells. One of the people in the lab was helping me with it, and towards the end of those steps for the day, we realized we had skipped a step in the protocol as she was teaching me. Thankfully, we were able to fix it because we still had products from the previous step. That really reassured me that it was okay to make mistakes, especially if even someone trained like her can accidentally skip a step, as long as we own up to them and find ways to fix them, even if it isn’t as easy of a fix as the one we encountered. It also reminded me not to be too comfortable in my knowledge, and to check off each step of a protocol and double check. Despite these precautions, I’m sure I’ll still make mistakes. We aren’t perfect, as much as we would like to be. I’ve just got to try and minimize the number I make!
This week has been a good one, and I’m excited to continue with research for the next 7 weeks!
