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MIchelle Lu - Wow this is frustrating

Thank god I chose to stay here for 9 weeks because 6 weeks is honestly not enough! Even with antibody staining after antibody staining and 4 hour sessions on the confocal microscope, only now are we finally starting to collect usable data. As I've learned from my past month here, most of lab is troubleshooting, figuring out what to do next when (because it will) something goes wrong. I've realized that in order to be a successful scientist, you must stay optimistic and open-minded. If you are the kind of person that gives up the second something goes wrong, you'll walk in and walk out of the lab in less than 10 minutes. But even with an open and optimistic mindset, it can get extremely frustrating at times. Just last week, Anna and I were trying to learn how to use a program called Imaris to quantify the images we got after spending the whole week harvesting the tissue, sectioning it and staining it - a process that takes the whole week. Then, once we're sitting in front of Imaris, we realize the images are incompatible and we have to retake them. Since we are measuring for intensity, if we reuse the same samples too many variables are added in, so we have to redo the entire process. While it was definitely a good thing that we realized sooner than later, it was still incredibly annoying that those images that we spent so much time on creating were practically useless. Nevertheless, Anna and I remained positive as we wasted no time in creating the next couple of images. We should be ready to process and analyze the images tomorrow and hopefully get some pretty pictures to add to our dataset. 





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  1. UnknownJuly 22, 2018 at 5:27 PM

    Keep at it! As you are learning, scientific research involves figuring out why you didn't get the results you expected and lots of troubleshooting to just get things to work. But you will also find a tremendous sense of accomplishment when it does work! You will get there!

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