Let the games begin.

As I was sitting in laboratory today, staring blankly at the NSF Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Research Proposal that I am supposed to be writing, I realized that my life would make an extremely boring blog. And so, of course I want to subject the world to my ramblings about my life, because anything is better than writing this proposal.

Being a graduate student has completely changed the way I think about everything. Science is no longer something I simply read about and accept what I am told, but rather something to be questioned constantly. In high school they lie to you, they make you read books and they say "this is how it works" when really they don't know how it works, they're guessing and no one has proved them wrong yet. I read a handful of primary literature papers every week, and half of them are bullshit. Complete bullshit.

The other half of being a graduate student (the first half being reading everything you possibly can, in case that was unclear) is doing research itself. This is the part that I love and hate all at once. Reading is okay, I don't love it and I don't hate it. Research is like my Significant Other when he's being particularly difficult about something. I just want to smack him and tell him to cut it out.

Take this week for example:

Monday: Prepare gels for the week (Western and DNA). Start PCR.
Tuesday: Run gels, examine PCR results: Gel melts and bands are not in a line. Diagnosis: repeat next week.
Wednesday: Incubate Western Blot then develop: total time about 7 hours. Results: ugly, blown out bands that cannot be used for interpretation.
Thursday: Strip Western, try again. Results: Failure once more. Diagnosis: repeat next week.

 TL;DR of the week: Nothing worked right, and I have to do it all again next week.

I wish I could say this wasn't typical. It is. Failure happens at least once a week, if not in the form of scientific results, then in the fact that I slammed my hand in a freezer door, or worse yet my head. It makes me want to give up...

But then I realize that my results may not be pretty, but they reveal something I didn't know before. And they tell me something about biology that others have never seen. And I fall in love with Science all over again. Because science is really about discovery, answering questions, and being wrong about 70-80% of the time.

-Elise