I didn’t expect to get into this program. Which made for an ecstatic freshman when I received my admissions email. I was pretty humbled to learn about all of the features that came with it. Above all, I was looking forward to seeing how my first attempt at hands on research in a lab would play out. Up until I set foot in my lab, I didn’t think my experience in this program-as well as research in general-would be so procedure-saturated. At least, I didn’t realize there would be so many steps that would only take me to another step in the experiment.
I also didn’t take into account how carefully each one of these steps had to be carried out. If I so much as switch the caps to certain containers that are being used in an experiment, I might as well have mixed in every other chemical within 100 feet of me (a slight exaggeration but you get the point). I’m fortunate enough to have a patient mentor who’s shown me a method of organization which, while kind of tedious, prevents any unintended contamination. With all the time and attention I invested this past week, I look that much more forward to the results of my experiment.
Taking all this into account, I have a better understanding now of what to expect from my summer in the Telen Lab. I expect a small fraction of my time to be spent designing procedures that allow me to carry out experiments whose results-whether expected or not-show me something I didn’t know before. I expect most of my time to be spent actually carrying out these procedures to these experiments and doing them multiple times to validate my results. Lastly, I expect the smallest fraction of my time to be spent analyzing results and drawing conclusions. I’ll spend less time on this than on anything else most likely but it’ll be the most valuable of the time spent and this validates all of the work leading up to it.
