These past two weeks, I learned...

Research has been a ridiculous trip... First of all, it took about two months to finish purifying the DNA just to get to the point where we use it for our experiments. Since it took us longer than expected to finish getting the materials ready, all other deadlines were set back, and so I've had to power through experiment after experiment everyday for the past two weeks. It's pretty exhausting, I've gotta say. Especially since my results haven't been quite what has been expected, and all the repetition and fine-tuning that's involved in research. It's easy to get swept up in the negative results, and get discouraged. For a while, I've gotta admit, that's how I've been feeling. Do I really have to do all this? Why can't we just bend the results a little bit, to support the conclusions we've predicted? Why do I need to repeat everything? Why is this taking forever? Research is awesome, as long as everything goes smoothly and according to plan. When it doesn't, however, it could get pretty emotionally and physically draining. One of the questions of this summer that I've been trying to figure out is if a life of research is meant for me. The fact that I've been feeling this way just makes me think twice about going into research as my career. At the same time, I'm trying to differentiate between my temporary, "in-the-moment" attitudes and my genuine emotions about research.

As I sat on the shuttle last Friday on the way up to Chalon, I had a moment of clarity. I can't just give up on this. I can't just stop and quit. There is a reason why my mentor has entrusted me with this particular project in our research group. No one's ever worked on this project before, and that thought rekindled a sense of responsibility and passion within me. It's not that I feel obligated to finish it. It's not that I'm being forced to work on it. I'm a passionate person, overall, and I hate doing something if I can't put my entire heart into it. In my heart, I thought, "This is exciting stuff. I have to do all I can to figure out what's going on here, and further this research as much as I can. It doesn't matter if the experiments go wrong one after the other. It doesn't matter how much work, time, and effort I have to put into this project. I have to and I want to work on this because this is what I love to do, and it's important to me." These past two weeks, I learned not to be so quickly discouraged in research when things go wrong, and to find a point to which I could stay passionate. Because as I've heard from multiple researchers at Caltech during my summer internship, it's not uncommon to get only one good result out of very, very many repetitions of experiments.

Yup, so that's my life in research, with this precious lesson learned within the past two weeks. I've earned a renewed respect for researchers everywhere, and I'm seriously beginning to realize exactly how much work goes into every result, every major discovery, every paper, every talk. Mad props to anyone working in any area of the research field, forreal!