Every time I pipette a little voice inside me tells me the tube's going to explode

Mod 1 is over! That was exciting.

I feel better than I ever have about navigating a lab. My confidence in my ability to carry out a written protocol is somewhere in the ballpark of this guy's:

Next year I'm hoping to take advantage of that new undergraduate thesis option BE is offering. In *that* context, I expect things to look more like this:

Thanks to last year's blog for the idea to use the dog memes. Anyway...

Here's what I learned so far in 20.109 and how it's been consistent or inconsistent with my other lab experiences:

1: That nagging voice that you messed up in step 2 is only right about 20% of the time. Oh, and preparation helps. So far this semester I think I've only messed up really badly twice. One of those times was on the one protocol I didn't skim the night before. I don't think that was a coincidence.

Example of potentially messing something up by not reading carefully: This blog. Is there a prompt...? I found  something like "Your posts should reflect your experiences" on the wiki. This helped me rule out my plan to write about my new cat, but I'm not sure I'm even close to on topic.

Consistent: with other experiences? Definitely. When I prepare, I understand the science. When I follow the science, I mess up much less. My UROP supervisor actually thinks this is so important that he discourages me from keeping a notebook because "the more times you think it through, the easier it will be later in life." Not sure I agree with him, but reading before doing is a habit I'll try to keep.

(By the way, here's the cat. And yes, I celebrate Christmas in April):

2: Controls are everything. It's really important to do control experiments to confirm all the work that leads up to your experiment:  that the cloning worked, that your protein is indeed FKBP12, and that you can use conventional methods like Western Blots to keep tabs on your protein. These experiments usually don't work, but it's good practice to slash your confidence before you get into the really interesting stuff.
Consistent with other experiences? Yep. Before I left for break, I FINALLY finished controls for my UROP. It only took 6 weeks, and now I'm ready to do what I was supposed to be doing in week 2. Freshman IAP, I spent a month trying to get some scales to work.

More seriously, I have learned the importance of controls. The SMM was impossible to follow when looking at the data in bulk. When I looked at rapamycin's data, I felt at least more oriented. I imagine that good experimenters do get working controls long before they publish.

3: I can convince myself I understand a project without actually understanding it. Presenting was hard. There's a big difference between reading a paper until I'm following it and reading a paper until I can help someone else follow it.
Consistent? No. This was new. I had done a poster presentation before, and I thought it was relatively easy. Now I think I bombed it. Sorry old boss...

4: There are always at least two stories. We could have talked about our results in the M1 Data Summary, or we could have talked about the fact that our method gave us results. It seems like this would pretty much always be the case, and it helps me make a lot of sense of the titles I see on scientific papers.