The devil is in the details

I'm glad that's over

Sorry that I haven't been around much lately. I went to Providence over the weekend of the 18th-19th (to be blogged later today) and then I came back and had lots of work to do last week. Thanks to pressure from my boss and pressure from myself I worked relatively long hours all last week and through this weekend. Why so much work? Well, I had to give lab meeting this morning. I don't generally enjoy giving lab meetings and I was particularly worried about this one. Very few of the experiments that I have done since my last lab meeting have worked, so I wasn't sure what I was going to be able to show for myself. In the end, I took the talk from the Denmark conference in September and changed it around a little and then added in one slide about failed experiments and the newer, more recent working data. There were only about 4 slides (out of 24) that involved data that I hadn't shown before, although the repeated data was presented considerably better and was much more organized than I had ever presented in past lab meetings.

The whole thing went pretty well, I must say. There were no hard questions (one softball question and one suggestion) and afterwards a few people said nice things (even though I must say that my actual delivery was pretty terrible. I talked about 4x my normal speed, which is fast to begin with.) Most of the people even commented on how close I was to being done with this part of the project, which is a nice thing to have re-confirmed. I was particularly happy to hear that many people were impressed by one set of experiments in particular (done within the last couple of weeks and properly analyzed Saturday). People liked the experiment and thought the conclusion was really interesting. Even more gratifying (at least for me) was that everyone believed the data (it wasn't as clean cut as some other types of data) and that the people who do similar types of experiments said that they have never seen their experiments come out so cleanly. I was sort of afraid that I'd have the slide up on the screen and have everyone say "those graphs aren't really different." It is particularly nice since this is a technique that I had just started doing and it worked and gave me really nice data on the first try. :)

So....lab is finally a little better than it was. Oh...the paper is officially accepted to Science . And I have a new minion, an undergraduate (a freshman!) who started last week. That is entirely another story...

posted by Immunegirl @ 11:11 AM