Patience and Endurance

These are the small vials used for the HPLC machine. If you look closely, you can see another, even smaller, vial sticking out of the tops of the brown ones. We use these to save more solution, rather than using excessive amounts to fill the brown container.

         Boa tarde, it's 2pm and life is great! The street I live on has a fair every Saturday, so I'm currently munching on a delicious pastel. The atmosphere here in the city is really growing on me. Speaking with different people and learning new words is always fun for me. The residents make it easy, because most are very patient.

        Patience: one of the many things I can learn from the Brasilians I come in contact with. As the summer nears its close, the ERG experiment I have been working on also nears it's final phases. With so much data to analyze, check, and reanalyze, I'm beginning to feel a bit anxious about my work. In the lab, I need to learn quickly, and execute tasks with efficiency. This sounds easy, but apparently there's always room for error if you're not careful. This past week while analyzing a portion of my data, I found a discrepancy that caused me to restart the entire process. The axis on one of the most important digital programs I use, Matlab, was not correct. Therefore the data produced by that engine was not correct, and all of the data I used in 2 other digital programs was also incorrect. Overall, I'm thankful I found the problem in time to fix it, however if I were more careful earlier I could have saved myself the extra work. A similar situation happened a week earlier. One of my lab mentors, Diego, and I were preparing to run HPLC. Once we filled all of the vials with the solutions of varying concentrations, we found that we had a small (actually large) problem. The most concentrated solutions began to form crystals! We later found that when filling the vials, if bubbles are left inside, crystals are more likely to form at any concentration. This is not good when running HPLC because the "L" stands for liquid.. not crystals (haha). Patience came in handy at this time because even though it was almost 7pm and we had to refill each vial, we couldn't rush.

        Although I'd like to perform certain steps quickly and figure out all the answers to all the questions of the experiment now, I can't. Science takes time, patience, and understanding. If I decide that I don't want to go slow, I'll have to start steps over and go slow anyway. I'm learning to be more observant, careful, and inquisitive. My time here in the lab has also taught me that efficiency doesn't just mean fast. I want to make sure that my time is spent well the first time, and that all the bases are covered. If this means extra research about a certain computer program, or flicking the bubbles out of 44 small vials, so be it! Since then, we have done 3 HPLCs without having that same problem. This doesn't mean that others don't arise, but it does mean that I'm learning! In the coming weeks, I will be on the path to making some conclusions about my work. As I continue to think carefully, I trust that my data will provide the exact answer I'm looking for. Until next time!