Monday, July 9, 2012

I'm supposed to do what now?

I've been working in the cholera lab since the end of June now. When the PI said that he expects me to be independent, he wasn't fucking around! My research project is centered around developing a zebrafish model of cholera colonization and infection, so I'm continuing the failed cloning that I feebly worked on during my rotation. Also, now that I've passed prelims and thus should know what I'm doing (ha!), I've been charged with developing a protocol to test for the presence of cholera toxin in water that held cholera-infected zebrafish. The PI didn't tell me what strains to use (and what medium to grow them in) to infect the fish, if I should use log phase or overnight cultures, if I should do a time course, or anything. It's been surprisingly stressful trying to come up with a reasonable experimental plan. I'm sure the point of the "sink or swim" approach is that you learn better what not to do by falling on your face a few times, but this is pretty brutal for me at the moment. However, I don't have to run any ideas by him before I try something new, unless I need really expensive equipment or reagents (I don't even know what dollar amount he considers "really expensive"), so at least that's kinda nice.

 I have to rely pretty heavily on the other grad students in my lab - as well as the grad student, PI, and tech in the fish lab upstairs - for help. I hate being dependent on other people for anything. I'd rather kill myself trying to do something independently than to make my life easier by asking for help. I'm working on getting over this. Slowly. It's really strange working in a lab with other people. It almost feels like I've joined a cult. Seriously. Everyone shares all the reagents (down to the same tubes of Taq and homemade PCR buffer), and whoever uses the last of something has to make more. Sharing tubes of reagents is a little weird (why not just give everyone their own aliquots?), but replacing what you use up is not weird - I don't want to make it seem like I think it is. That is a very good thing! Everyone is assigned a certain chore like making bottles of autoclaved water, LB, autoclaving tubes, etc. The one group activity is stuffing tip boxes - which really sounded cult-like to me. I just picture us all standing at a bench in a row, stuffing tip boxes like synchronized automatons. Makes me shudder a little. As strange as all of this is to me, everyone has made it clear that I can do things the way I want to - if I want my own aliquots of PCR buffer, I can do that. But, I don't want to break away from the way the rest of the lab does things - at least not this early on. Everyone has been very accommodating and helpful though.

I apologize for such a boring blog post - I'm even boring myself right now. Hopefully I'll be back to my normal smart-mouthed self before long and I promise that I will write accordingly.

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