I've been HIT by data!!!
Days in the lab are all about data.
After dispersing from morning meetings, I make the long and arduous trek to my lab building. This trek involves going up the intensely intimidating hill that is Research Drive, but it keeps me in shape. Upon completing my morning exercise and arriving in my lab, I set up my laptop on one side of the lab bench, and proceed to my other workspace around the pipettors with my portfolio and lab notebook. My mornings usually involve solution making and data collecting. I'll usually prepare a stock solution, which involves massing out a protein and adding it to water, or if the stock 1 is already prepared, I'll prepare dilutions of that stock. After preparing the dilutions, I might have time to do one run in the spectrophotometer (spec) before lunch. That involves getting out the cuvettes, aliquotting stock 2 in micro-centrifuge tubes, and adding various amounts of heparin. Then I put a solution in a cuvette, put the cuvette in the spec, collect absorbance, SAVE the data, rinse and repeat.
Lunch follows, usually with other HH'ers living similarly glamorous lives.
After lunch, more solutions! I'll end up running about four more "Stock 2's" and then sit down with my notebook to record the peak absorbance for each sample. Entering the data in the computer is ALWAYS an adventure, as is messing around with the graph. The most exciting part of the day is leaning back in my chair, looking at the graph, admiring the pretty peaks, drops, leveling off, shifts in curves, and knowing that nothing would be there if it wasn’t for my constant vigilance in solution making. Yes, it is an ego trip, but one well-deserved.
Another typical day would involve me preparing THE BOX (tubes, solutions, micropipettes, calculator, and more) to go over to a lab in Hudson Hall and running my solutions in the Dynamic Light Scatterer. These days are similar to my ones with a normal spec, I just happen to be in a different lab with a lot more people, and I have to wash the cuvettes with toluene before putting them in the machine.
My lab days involve me living an exciting life on the edge . . . the edge of the cuvette, the edge of the lab bench, the edge of Research Drive.
