Science and Setbacks: Slow IS Fastest

Feedbacks from a few of our Fellows in Life Sciences:

For science disciplines, many things can go wrong if you do not plan your experiments well. Take plenty of time to plan your experiments, go over the proposal with you advisor or graduate students as much as possible. Do not neglect the minor details such as the availability of a certain instrument, a kit or required reagents on the day of your planned experiment. Even if you think you took too long just to plan the experiment, do not worry! If you are careful with your planning, you might be able to get the desired results in one go. Careless planning could be devastating to your entire project timeline!

Also, don't be in too much of a hurry when running your experiments. I have found that whenever you try to do things faster, you will usually end up having to spend more time than if you had taken more time at the beginning.

An idea for your lab notebook is to write everything down as if you have amnesia, and will have only the notebook from which to glean all the information you will need later. A year later it will feel like you have amnesia when you are looking back at that old information and assays! There is no substitute for a well written lab notebook!

You cannot always anticipate the amount of time an assay (procedure) will take. I was stuck for almost a month and it was due to an error in mislabeling made prior to my having entered the lab. What you can anticipate are setbacks. I had already realized that science had set backs, but the more graduate students that I talked to, the more I discovered that some had had set backs amounting to years! So, when planning your research have main goals in mind, of where you want go, but let the science guide itself. Sometimes the best discoveries are in the most unlikely situations.

It is important to set realistic goals and then form a plan of action to attain them. Additionally, one cannot expect to achieve perfect results on an initial attempt. Rather, discovering that a particular approach fails is an important step in finding a successful one.

Strategies for documenting your research:

• Always keep an up-to-date lab notebook. It only takes a few minutes daily to document your findings. This daily documentation helps a great deal when "thesis-writing" season comes along.

• Always label your gel pictures clearly (or any other data figures).

• If possible, ask a graduate student or your advisor to check your lab notebook on a regular basis. In that way, if they spot any errors you will have plenty of time for rectification.

• Never delete/discard data until you have completely finished your thesis, just in case you might need that piece of data that seemed insignificant at one time.

• Always keep good records of mistakes that you have made along the way, or results that did not come out as you anticipated. As mentioned earlier, many things can go wrong in science experiments. If you keep careful records, you can avoid making the "same mistake twice."

Resources: www.ncbi.nih.gov

NCBI is an online directory with information for all scientific disciplines. You can set up your own account (for free) at NCBI and save your searches and add things to your "collection." NCBI and its affiliates (such as OMIM, PubMed?, etc...) will serve as an invaluable resource as you conduct your literature review and write your thesis.