Literature Review presentation for main supervisor this week. It was 1) unrehearsed (It was NOT prepared last minute, though I realized it was missing a number of important points) 2) packed with a lot of information [I talked until my throat felt dry and the laser pointer went out of battery] 3) not to my satisfaction (The audience appeared to think otherwise. I missed out a few small details.). I need to improve on the presentation to pass a sterner supervisor 3 weeks from now.
Regarding real work, biochemical C assay was postponed to allow time for plating optimization (I am close to completing this part). Biochemical C assay will resume next week with an improved protocol. However, there is only sufficient material to run a single assay. After that, I will have to wait for the company to deliver the goods we have ordered. In the mean time, I will work on other stuff.
The main work this week is the time point study of Organism. Isolation of Organism at various time points and fixing of cells for analysis was done. Unfortunately, I fell prey to carelessness again. I used only a half-strength fixative due to pipetting error. I admit. It was stupid. 2 days of working till 11pm gone down the drain because of a stupid mistake that I discovered only on the final day. The only consolation was that I managed to harvest the Organism to perform quantification next week. Of course, if that assay turns out negative, it means I have wasted an entire week again. Given my tight schedule, this is not acceptable
Although it is human to err, I must learn from my mistakes and not repeat them EVER. I realized that the different between the current me and the me several months ago is that I am putting more thoughts into my work. Since I have no assigned mentor to follow and there are a myriad of protocols that work, I need to decide how to carry out my work so that results obtained at this point can be used to analyze and compare against future results. If there is anything I think that is worth celebrating thus far, this modest maturation of thought is it.
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