It's the first full week and Dr. Cotter instructed us to organize and clean the - 80° freezer. Oh wait a bit of new information: we have our new team member! Amanda! She is doing great so far and has lots of questions about the research. I can tell she is very eager to contribute. Ok now back to explaining the lessons learned. So me and Kassy were going through our samples and found that some of the tape that was used to label the bags our coincubated tubes were in froze off! We then checked our tubes to determine the dates the samples were processed and discovered they were not properly labeled. We were instantly shock and confused. So much stress ensued as we struggled to try and figure out what tubes were part of which week. Finally Wednesday we removed all our samples and were able to definitively determine the dates for a majority of the samples and so we can move on with the next phase of the project and analyze these microplastics! Phew! Always properly label everything my friends! (Photo is of fridge not freezer, I was not able to get a photo in time for this post. Photo credit to Josh)
It's the first full week and Dr. Cotter instructed us to organize and clean the - 80° freezer. Oh wait a bit of new information: we ha...
So this past Tuesday we finally went to the FTIR. It was surprisingly easier than using the SEM. The SEM can take almost an hour to p...
It’s good you caught the labeling error beforehand, I remember being in High school chemistry and we were suppose label which beakers were used in our solutions. Turns out I labeled the wrong ones that we were supposed to reuse, and I ended up throwing off all of the data which caused me and my lab group to restart our entire experiment. The group didn't let me forget about that mistake.
ReplyDeleteMaria, that is definitely a hard lesson to learn. But those hard lessons are the ones we never forget and the big mistakes made are usually corrected by that hard lesson learned. Still, I'm sorry it happened to you and your team. I had no idea that the tape would freeze off. Also, congrats on your new team member and getting into the October conference! :)
ReplyDeleteWe learn more from messing up than we do from succeeding. Besides, better it happened this early in the semester, knock on wood! I understand how you feel though, I can not tell you how many times I have had a "flub up" working on my projects. You have a much better work ethic than I do too, so I know you will not let this bog you down!
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