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<\/a><\/p>\nSpring has come to campus: exotic cherry trees have unfurled rosettes of pink petals; undergraduates are wearing shorts and T-shirts; even the lecturers on industrial action last week couldn\u2019t help smiling on the picket line as they basked in the warm sunshine. The final stage of publishing my paper \u2013 the culmination of four years\u2019 work on a massive screening project \u2013 has been punctuated by periods of waiting: waiting for a collaborator to finish up and send his loose ends, waiting for co-authors to return their final comments, waiting for my boss to read the manuscript. During these spells, I\u2019ve been preparing for my scheduled lab meeting, using it as an opportunity to set out and present my final exit plan. When I submit the paper in a few days\u2019 time, I want to shoot out of the starting gate at full speed.<\/p>\n
Nine months. Long enough to gestate a baby with relative ease, but a very short period in which to concoct a future research plan, assemble preliminary data and write a successful grant or fellowship about it. Nevertheless, this is exactly what I intend to do. <\/p>\n
It has been very satisfying, poring over my lab notebooks and extracting useful data. I always save everything and carefully document what I\u2019ve done, so it\u2019s possible to extract new information from old slides, images and even homogenized lysates stored in the freezer. I haven\u2019t initiated a new experiment for months now, but I managed to follow an interesting thread and accumulate enough new evidence to make a convincing case about the way I want to go forward. Yesterday I presented it to the group \u2013 despite my new resolve, I was still pleasantly surprised at how positively everyone else reacted to my plan.<\/p>\n