Another (Not so) Dumb Week

Another dumb week. Fixation went wrong. Nevermind. The medium turned pink. I was doing assay halfway when senior came in and noticed the colour. Although he merely commented, I abandoned the assay. What is the point of continuing when it is already wrong. Good thing I had the foresight to keep another set of sample to perform the assay.

So yes. This week, beside literature review, I accomplished little else. THIS HAS TO CHANGE OR I WILL BE REPEATING MY MISTAKES LAST YEAR!!! I need to change the way I work. So one week gone. Wonderful. Nevermind. I still one week before school starts. Need to work all the way through next week. Must keep Friday night free. So Monday to Thursday, I declare war against my sloth!

Project Final Fantasy Week 7.5

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.

Project Final Fantasy Week 6.5 Update

2 weeks till real schedule kicks in. No progress for this week. I thought I could finish my literature review this week. But problems cropped up and my slowness (self-perceived) ate up quite a bit of time. My immune cells for verification were wasted because my lysis buffer was missing an important component. Therefore, the biochemical C assay has to be postponed until at least Monday.

I hope to begin Organism growth curve determination this week. It might take a week or two. I will have to ask seniors if this is necessary. I hope to at least start cytotoxicity test within these 2 weeks as well. With these two matters settled, at least I think I am done with the bulk of optimizations. Literature review is moving along slowly. Many things to read. Many many things. Next week is the scheduled presentation week. The exact day has not yet been fixed. I will discuss with seniors tomorrow. Compared to the others, I think I am less "controlled". No one sets deadlines for me (unlike my friend who has schedules planned out by her supervisor - I kind of like that. But it sound that she is not trusted to run her own schedule, which is not good in a way). Then again, I intrinsically know I am behind time. At least a week or two behind time. This will help put the fact that my co-workers left behind me. No time to feel sad about what has happened when there is so much more to be done.

So you see, I have a lot of things to do. Medicine people will end their exams in early September. However, that is the time when the other people are slugging it out (Yes, you have seen it right. Slugging it out). Hopefully I can squeeze out an evening for a dinner. It has been more than a year.

Ah yes. I "skipped" work on Saturday (Simply take a break from experiments). It feels nice to stay at home (finally got to re-watch Aliens), though I was feeling groggy most of the time. Probably due to the lack of sleep for the past month or two.