9: INDEPENDENCE
Chira granted me full authority today.
I have to admit, I like being in control.
The task today was basically a repetitive state of everything she taught me last week.
I took detailed notes, asked multiple questions, and typed up my own protocol.
All for this moment.
I’m no longer that lost kid walking around the floor to find my supervisor all the time.
I can do whatever I want during the experiment, as long as I deliver the quality and quantity that meets up to their expectations.
I love being in charge of my own experimental progress and break time.
Can’t say the same for Brian.
We tried to split the work for data analyzing, but he isn’t as efficient as I thought he would be.
We started the analysis at the same time, and during that time period, I went out to talk to another co-worker for 20 minutes or so, by the time I got back, Brian still hasn’t caught up to speed.
I ended up finishing 1 hour before him, so I had myself a two hour lunch break.
I walked in the lunch room on the 5th floor which I normally never do, and took a seat in one of the tables.
In the same table, two co-workers were eagerly speaking in Chinese about their research progress.
I didn’t expect to have a conversation with anyone.
But, the Caucasian guy next to me beamed with excitement when he saw me sitting down.
“Can you tell I’m having a marvelous conversation with these ladies?”
“I’ve been sitting here praying that they’re not talking about me”
“Do you think they’re talking about me?”
I never laughed so hard with anyone’s opening sentence.
I casually asked him how his day went, even though I’ve never seen him in my life.
He told me he works as a statistical analysis, his job is to analyze the research data, and numbers are his passion. He’s a summer student, after this summer, he’s moving to Finland to start his PhD.
He moved here from Arizona, and he served in the US military before.
I’m amazed by the different professions I get to meet along this job opportunity.
He gave me a few insightful suggestions to future careers, and I’m glad I had a conversation with him.
2:00PM
There was yet again, another seminar to attend.
There were already 3 seminars last week, and there’s 4 more this week.
I feel like this is a bit too frequent, cause I would need to take time off my lab to attend these seminars.
I arrived early to the seminar today, because I really had nothing better to do.
“Hey long time no see”, It’s the Caucasian guy
It’s only been 20 minutes.
The seminar today was composed of PhD students talking about their current research project.
One of the PhD student presented her experiment that was almost identical to the BIOL340 lab in UBC, and her western blot results were all over the place.
“I overshot the solution into another lane, this is what I suspect that caused the smudge”
Can’t believe I gave up my lab time for this.
You’d think PhD students would deliver higher quality results than undergrads.
After the seminar,
I went back to the lab and continued on with my hybridization experiment.
Brian really had no idea what was going on, so I had to give him orders every step of the way.
He was really slowing the progress down, so I asked him to do an easy job:
Send the pipet tips downstairs to autoclave.
He magically managed to screw up that part too, he spilled the pipet tips everywhere.
Although it’s nice to have a little helper, doing the things you don’t want to do.
But it would’ve been nice if they would just let me do everything, and pay me double the amount.
Just a thought.