Hi all,
It’s been a few weeks since I posted, we’ve have been very busy in the IMML, and on some days very stressed. I feel it is important to quickly mention that science sometimes can be very stressful and difficult. The past few months, I have taken over as the lead graduate student in our lab, which is a great opportunity to work on my leadership and mentoring skills. But it also comes with a lot of responsibility that can at times be very stressful.
The past two months I spent weeks planning an experiment, I’m a very organized person. I thought out (what I thought) was every detail. I was certain that I had everything perfectly planned….and then all of our cancer cells randomly died. This was a cancer study, it’s quite difficult to study cancer, if you don’t have any cancer to study. So trying to quickly order supplies and get them prepped in time for the experiment was quite stressful, but we managed and I was certain we were back on track…..
Our lab members (Right to Left) Kirsten Dunlap, Maryam Mumtaz, and Seong Lim busting out some science the past few weeks!
The lies we tell ourselves…Less than two weeks later another part of that experiment went wrong and we had to move up our timeline two weeks earlier than we were originally anticipating. Not surprisingly, moving an experiment up two weeks is NOT IDEAL for any laboratory. This also required some significant lab hustling to get everything prepped in time to finish the experiment with useable data. We scrambled, hustled and spent two 12hr days in the laboratory finishing out the experiment. Our new labmates had never worked with experiments like this, and all of a sudden everyone was learning and performing multiple new laboratory skills while I was trying to manage the overall project. Needless to say it was exhausting and we were all pooped by the end of it. BUT, the past few weeks have definitely demonstrated how important teamwork is for successful science, through the good times and the bad. Science can be tough, frustrating, and exhausting. But it can also be exciting, fun and quite fulfilling. You just need the right team to make the exciting and fun substantially outweigh the frustrating and exhausting, and I think we’ve got a pretty good team.
ANYWAY, the next few weeks for us will be finally starting to analyze all the data from the past few experiments, prepping for some experiments in the Fall (hopefully with a bit less crazy), and starting on my project we received funding through our Central States chapter of the ACSM and our departmental grants. Oh and school starts soon so I guess that means we’ll also meander to those as well.
Cheers to a summer and fall of #sciencing! -Megan