Research Worries

I have been working hard on the guinea pig brains over the past week-point-five and it’s getting close to my next moment of truth. This Sunday while Rachel is at work I’m going to come in and run a Western and see what kind of stuff comes out the other end of the five-hour procedure. I’m starting to get concerned about the outcome though, as I have run into a number of various snags over the course of my cut-and-punch routine. I’ve had to adjust my techniques a few times to get the best results and it still seems like I might be missing the most critical sections of the brain, or punching the wrong part of the sections.

Yeah…a lot of that probably doesn’t make sense but the point it this: I’ve worked hard and I’m really afraid I screwed up and it will all be for nothing.

Adding to the pressure is the Friday deadline for submitting an abstract to UMBC’S Undergraduate Research Day. I want to be able to present my work in the spring (when I’ll probably actually have some usable data) but I have to come up with something to submit now. On top of that, my PI (Principal Investigator, my boss) wants to use the data I’m generating to write a grant, which in the research world is a pretty big deal. It would be amazing to get to publish this early in my career but before I can even start thinking about that, I have to have something worth talking about.

Ah, the uncertainty!