The daily grind

Drug discovery and cancer research might sound real exciting and glamorous, but this summer I've been in a bit of a rut. I've taken on a very data intensive approach to answer a question I've had for a while. That this means is most mornings I set up tubes for 13 reactions, and every time I go through the same thought process.

I have 5 colors of tubes- Pink, Magenta, Yellow, Blue and Green. Pink and Magenta aren't that different, and should be kept apart to avoid confusion. I can save myself a lot of time labeling if I match colors - ie, the reaction is set up in a yellow tube, and I will test 6 time points, each of those should be yellow, and I only label the first tube, not all 7. Following? The timepoints are staggered 20 seconds apart, which means at no point can I use any part of my brain to keep track of this- my lizard brain does color matching and simple pattern recognition.

So each morning, I lay out (13x7=)91 tubes, and try to find the magic combination that will be quickly recognizable (so I don't screw up and waste time), and finish all the colors of tubes at about the same time- so then I can get a new box of tubes all at once.

To clarify how brainless this has been, this summer I used up an entire aliquot of STOP reagent- I use 1 uL to stop each timepoint. There are 1000 uL in one mL, and STOP reagent comes in 1.5 mLs. So yeah, glamorous it is not.
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In bad news that is good news that might later be bad news again.... after a bit of confusion, Dr. Boss and I agreed that I should give TWO seminars this fall. One is a "reward" for the poster fair madness. The other is an invited Research in Progress talk. Both are at the Cancer Institute, which is a really good place for me to give talks. I had been worried that my resume was going to be thin after graduating since I haven't had many opportunities to give talks. This helps.

The first talk is 12 minutes, on September 14. I will probably give the same talk I gave in Madison- so, awesome.