My science FINALLY worked!! This is sing-and-dance exciting. This is such a relief I actually teared up when I read the image this morning. This is a good day.
Without boring you in the details of what the science was, I've been holding my breath all week for this next round of trouble shooting an experiment I've been working on exclusively since April. I've been working on this exclusively because it is the final pending experiment for my former mentor's paper. This a good news on a lot of fronts:
- my mentor's paper can go out, which she has been waiting for since she graduated
- my boss no longer thinks I am inept
- *I * get authorship on a paper, and a double bonus, my guilt about being on this paper for 'hardly any work' was completely diminished by mid-May
- and I can finally move on to other experiments. This is a big on for me (even if the last one is better in the long run). I realized after my comprehensive exam that if you are going to work long hours for little pay there obviously has to be another motivation to go in. (Working ~60 hrs a week, I stop making minimum wage, which I do when things don't work) Killing myself for an experiment that won't budge makes the salary seem really tiny, especially when there are more interesting things I would like to be doing.
Of course my boss is away, so I emailed him the result. He wrote back, and as expected, asked me to try it once more, with one more concentration on the titration. But I'll be happy to do it because I know it works now.
Happy Dance!!
3 comments:
Congratulations! I remember that you had worked on it even before your comps. What was the secret?
Love you!
2 things, I got SUPER hot radiation (3000Ci/mmol instead of 10), and I ignored the 'yield' of the labeling reaction. The protocol says the label should be diluted to some very low concentration, but I didn't bother and it worked. I'll be deleting that part of the protocol.
WOW! That's so exciting. Work can be so great when there are exciting moments like that. There are less of those for me, but that's, I think, because I work on smaller segments. If one of my projects took a doctorate and several years of research to accomplish, I'd be pretty darn exciting when it worked, too.
Also: Radiation. Woo. Be careful, though. I may have a backup sister, but I'm sure the field of academia would hate to loose such a promising young researcher. :)
-N
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