Tag: project

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Doing Dishes

When I am a little frustrated, I blog about it. I have found that it clears your head and is quite an effective release mechanism.

And recently, I have found another way for times when I am more frustrated – a LOT frustrated:

Wash glassware.

Just grab a brush, pour a dollop of soap and take it ALL out on the stupid organic stuff sticking in there that just won’t go away. Bonus points for you if you can get it sparkly clean (suitable for a dish-washing soap advertisement) and a gold medal (albeit imaginary) if you can make that water “sheet” over your glassware during your distilled water rinse (nothing more spiritually satisfying than that).

Washing glassware is my research-bane: it’s the rate limiting step to my progress – where I’m most likely to procrastinate when starting a new experiment. To a normal human mind, washing some glass bottles and beakers could look like a mundane and quick step, but it can be quite tiring and time-consuming depending on how finicky you are about your glassware (and of course, we scientists-of-the-wet-labs, have specific procedures for washing our dishes.)

(Also, if you would like to read in depth about the many things that can get your beakers sparkly clean (except for cracks and scratches, where the only remedy might be to get new sparkly-clean glassware), I highly recommend this link).

So if I can have really clean bottles in my cabinet and methodically washed glass slides in my drawer, I have one less excuse to laze around and can start working on my next steps. It’s like killing two birds with one stone and so this is where I can channel the frustration of my failed-lab-experiments.

Now, from my recent frustrations, I have accumulated a fair number of glass bottles and washed slides and I am good for a couple of upcoming series that I should be running.

After I run out, I can think about learning the art of strategic frustration so that I can always have some clean glassware at hand in future, or when needed (not sure how that would work, but if I do, that can be for another blog post).

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Problem: Solutions

Lately in science, I have been trying to dissolve a  couple of salts in some “solvent” – I have now tried some options, but nothing has really worked so far.

So today, after around 3 weeks of trying to dissolve that salt, I sat down to compile the results of all my mixtures of salts-and-solvents – they could definitely not be called “solutions”.

And that was exactly what was wrong with these, not only scientifically and technically, but also on a literary level: What do I call them when I am writing my report to send to my supervisor?

We, scientists, are supposed to be very specific in terms of technical terms. So I could call them “solutions”, because I was ultimately aiming to make a solution but just was not getting there. But then, they weren’t really solutions, so how could I call them that? If I did, what kind of a scientist would that make me? Would I even be able to sleep at night?

It was a relief I could use the word “suspension” appropriately enough for some of them. That was really so considerate of that particular salt-solvent combination to give me the freedom to use another word.

For all other… Mixtures? Salt-solvent systems?… What do I call them? Or do I just craftily go on writing about them, carefully avoiding sentence structures where I would need to use the you-know-what word?

It’s crazy what people expect of a PhD student: they have to be a scientist in the lab, a writer when writing reports and papers and dissertations, and  an excellent communicator when they are supposed to present their work (and the best sales person if they choose to go into entrepreneurship).

And being a writer at that particular moment of time, how many times could I allow myself to use the word “mixture” over and over again? Or using the same sentence structure for every next line?

I do not know how I managed all that today. I just hope I can sleep at night.

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Bad Day for Science?

It hadn’t been past 12 yesterday when I had officially declared it a bad day for science.

The hot plate I was supposed to be using extensively broke down (again!) and I discovered that one of the good things going on seemed so rosy because I had been miscalculating some things (and misleading myself and others about how it was going so good at that end).

Having been through all that by 11, well, what could happen now that would make it a better day?

But in retrospect, I think I may have labelled yesterday a little too soon – because the day itself didn’t turn out that bad after all.

We, scientists, we label. And that’s a good thing. You should label all your solutions and chemicals as soon as possible, even before you put your stuff in a blank bottle, but essentially ahead of forgetting what you put in there (and until you have labelled these, your life hangs in some kind of a science-purgatory where you keep chanting the words in your head until you have penned it down where it belongs).

But today – today when I was again tempted to categorize the day in the bad-days* section, I reminded myself that a scientist should not label her days as hastily as she should label her sample bottles.

 

* A “bad” day for science constitutes all days that are worse than your usual days, when it’s normal that things don’t always work the way you want them to. A “bad” day happens when you discover having an outlier compared to your average kind of day (which can normally be rated quite close to each other on a scale of 1 to 10).

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Blocked

I find writer’s block to be quite a fascinating thing.

It’s really a great reason for an author to be not-writing (read reason as excuse). And the best part is, it is considered a valid one, too. It’s the exact reason I am not writing a blog post every day.

In fact, it’d be pretty great to come up with terminologies for every kind of block that a PhD student might face. Like the “lab-experiment-block” or the “reader’s-block”. Or just plain old “work-block” that could fill in every time we don’t feel like working.

However, I do think even the far-better-evolved excuse of writer’s block would stop working so well for me once I start writing my PhD thesis (like everything else in science that doesn’t work).

Anyway, the other day, I was listening to this podcast “No Such Thing (As Writer’s Block)“. It tells, among other things, the routine of Isaac Asimov, the big sci-fi writer. He got up early morning, sat down and wrote… whether or not he felt like it. Every day.

Writing daily is a little daunting. I have given it a try in the recent past, and well, you can write daily if you want to, but you surely wouldn’t be producing your best work every day. Some days, yes, but not every day. However, statistically speaking, if you write something daily, then you increase your chances of producing something worthy at least some of the days.

Just as doing science daily is a little daunting, and somewhat demotivating if you are not seeing immediate results at least some of the times. But every experiment that you run, adds up, whether it was a failure or moderately successful. The more you put in, the better chances you have of seeing patterns.

Although you can sometimes get lost in “the cloud”, as this professor notes in this rather interesting TED Talk (that you might want to listen to if you are in science, or a problem solver in general).

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That Doesn’t Work

For the last four months, my PhD has accumulated into wonderful experiences of “okay so that doesn’t work”.

Which is good, because every time one thing doesn’t work, there’s one thing less to discover that doesn’t work, getting you one step closer to the thing that does work.

So you have this recipe/procedure/protocol that you need to optimize, or get the best out of. You start off with rather good energies, thinking the most it will take you is, what, three weeks? It seems pretty simple. You’ll easily find the best way to do it in that much of time. 

As you try on and on, you realize there are so many factors and parameters that are affecting the whole process. And to get to the best possible option, you will need to twiddle with all of those (ALL of those, one at a time. And then of course you have to make sure that once you are checking one factor, something else doesn’t meddle in and give you some kind of false positive or negative).

But…

… Do you even have all the options jotted down? There might be more. There must be something you are missing.

… What if option G was the best recipe? It did give some results but you probably went ahead trying H, I, J, K, L because you may discover something better (there might be no “better”, but you’ll need to find that out for yourself, now, won’t you?).

… Would “better” pass off as “best”? What even is meant by “best-possible recipe/procedure/protocol”? Is there a “better” than what you are considering “best”?

After everything, you end up with lots of data, most of which is just proof of how, mostly, it doesn’t work (if you are lucky, it may be otherwise). Obviously, there’s always a chance that nothing is going to work. And it might be some time before you realize that you need to change the whole game plan.

I mean, a PhD is like life in real time. So you want to learn about life, go get a PhD: It will teach you things in a couple years that you might take decades to learn otherwise.