To start this out, I should make it clear that "99%" has nothing to do with Wall St. or economics or people. It has to do with a quote from my boss. At the beginning of the summer, she said, "In Bench Science, 99% of what we do ends in failure. We live for the 1%." I heard it and I liked it, but I didn't take it seriously. After this summer, I know exactly what she was talking about.
This summer I got my own project to work on (yay!) whereas over the course of the year, I've been helping my grad student with her project. My project involved lots of trouble shooting, a terrible antibody, a not-so-helpful tech support team, and 5000 repeats of the same experiment, but it was absolutely worth every second. I can honestly say that there are few things in this world that make me as happy as getting nice, shiny, interpret-able data, whether or not it's what I had expected.
It has been a summer of forgetting my protein ladder and using it in every lane. It has been a summer of cursing out Western Blots, dancing in dark rooms, jubilantly repeating experiments hoping to get data that looks just like it did last week, and repeating them begrudgingly hoping that I never have to do them again. It's been a summer of happiness and frustration and mistakes, but most importantly, understanding. This is science. It's hard and frustrating and time consuming and mentally exhausting, but it's also the best thing in the world. This summer has been a lot of that 99% and I won't go so far to say that without the 99% I couldn't appreciate that 1%, but I will say that the 1% of success makes the 99% more than worth it and it's the 1% that makes the world what it is today.
I'm sitting in my room enjoying my 5 days of vacation before school starts. I'm supposed to be packing and getting ready to go to the store and go dorm shopping, but I decided to be lazy. Instead, I'm sitting on my bed going through old Facebook messages, Facebook stalking people I haven't seen in about a year, and thinking about how much things have changed since I've started school and started working in the lab.
It's officially been a year of my working in the lab and I can't say that it's been anything less than amazing. I'm a firm believer that some years are bigger than others and this past year has been amazing and fun and interesting and really really big. I got into a lab, I made friends, and I did science and I couldn't have asked for more.
We also had lab pictures recently. We're the hottest scientists in the south east.
Preview Pic.
