Tomorrow marks the end of my first month in the lab. You might expect me to report that the time has flown. But in truth, I have lived through each minute in painstaking real-time, and not all of it has been comfortable.
I never thought it would be easy, returning to a world I’d left behind. I’ve already shared with you the obvious, predictable problems: forgetting how to perform routine tasks; struggling to learn the facts and nomenclature underpinning an entirely new biological field; relearning how to think and read like a scientist instead of an editor.
But there have been things that have caught me off guard. Some, I am even ashamed to admit. For example, I’ve never been very good at mental arithmetic on the fly, being one of these sorts who always aced the English standardized tests but struggled more with the quantitative ones. I can do math well, but I require peace, quiet, time and a pencil to make it happen. So having to participate in rapid-fire conversations about complex robot-controlled nanomolar RNA-array plating schemes is proving challenging. Bioinformatics, too, has changed tremendously; a dozen or more whole-genome sequences later, I find myself unarmed for the current fray and hazy about the arsenal of tools that have sprung up online, rendering BLAST a quaint relic from bygone days.
“Just stop and ask,” my labmates, quite sensibly, advise. “Nobody is expecting you to master all this in two seconds.” But I, stubbornly, would prefer to hide my occasional inner panic from those higher up who might judge me. I’m not sure if it’s pride, or an innate sense of survival, but I need to appear at least nominally in control.
And yet. Amidst all this confusion during my journey up the steep learning curve, yesterday a glimmer of hope crossed my path. I was loading the PCR machine when someone from the adjacent lab came up bearing interesting tidings.
“Did you know,” she said, “that you’re at the lucky bench?”
When I shook my head, she added, “Everyone who’s ever worked at that bench has got a Cell paper. Absolutely everyone. So you’re bound to be next.”
Who am I to argue with my fate?
