Lab: You learn things the hard way
We aren't perfect beings so we all make mistakes. What's most important is that we accept them, learn from them, and move on. Here, I give you a list of my dumb mistakes that will hopefully make you feel better about yourself!
That moment when you...
1) Try to make a stable cell line and after a month of waiting, you drop your plates.
2) Put your not-so-well capped tubes in a water bath and they topple in the water.
3) Pipette into tubes that are in an ice bucket and then the tube topples and a chunk of ice comes in.
4) You think you can centrifuge microfuge tubes without capping them, and when you open the centrifuge, the caps are cut off.
5) Spill Ethidium Bromide and hope to god you don't get hand cancer.
6) Use the midiprep kit and equilibrate your column with QC wash buffer instead of QBT equilibrium buffer and you get a low yield of DNA.
7) Can't decipher between your 1 and 2 on your labelled tubes.
8) Dump the supernatant into the sink, but the pellet falls out because you're flicking the tube too hard.
9) Almost leave a -20 degrees stored antibody in an ice bucket overnight and you come back to the lab via Uber at midnight after catching a movie with friends.
10) Don't load into an actual well in your agarose gel and you lose your sample.
11) Make a gel and it leaks so you have to redo it or make more gel solution.
12) Melt your agarose gel because you set it on too high voltage.
13) Take out IP tubes that were on a rotator overnight, to then accidently flip off the cap when the tube is upside down and half of your sample is gone.
14) Suck up too much solution into your pipettors, and you don't realize that you need to change the filter for the pipettor to work again. You desperately search for different pipettors (Novice undergrad me).
15) Grab a plastic container holding some type of chemical powder, for it to randomly break and the powder floats everywhere, including your face (Thankfully I was wearing a mask).
16) Want to do a big experiment and your cell culture decides to not cooperate and dies.
17) Use a multichannel pipettor and you don't get all the tips so you miss a few wells.
18) Try to pipette a bunch of different samples and someone comes to have a conversation with you. Then you completely forget what you were doing.
19) Dump the supernatant that you were actually supposed to collect.
20) Go back to your lab notebook and wish past you was better at recording everything.
21) Add DAPI to live cells instead of Hoescht (Oh, my poor cells).
22) Realize reagents are missing on the day of your experiment.
23) Miss controls in your experiment so your data is not interpretable.
24) Have no idea what you are doing!!!
Keep calm and PhD on :)
That moment when you...
1) Try to make a stable cell line and after a month of waiting, you drop your plates.
2) Put your not-so-well capped tubes in a water bath and they topple in the water.
3) Pipette into tubes that are in an ice bucket and then the tube topples and a chunk of ice comes in.
4) You think you can centrifuge microfuge tubes without capping them, and when you open the centrifuge, the caps are cut off.
5) Spill Ethidium Bromide and hope to god you don't get hand cancer.
6) Use the midiprep kit and equilibrate your column with QC wash buffer instead of QBT equilibrium buffer and you get a low yield of DNA.
7) Can't decipher between your 1 and 2 on your labelled tubes.
8) Dump the supernatant into the sink, but the pellet falls out because you're flicking the tube too hard.
9) Almost leave a -20 degrees stored antibody in an ice bucket overnight and you come back to the lab via Uber at midnight after catching a movie with friends.
10) Don't load into an actual well in your agarose gel and you lose your sample.
11) Make a gel and it leaks so you have to redo it or make more gel solution.
12) Melt your agarose gel because you set it on too high voltage.
13) Take out IP tubes that were on a rotator overnight, to then accidently flip off the cap when the tube is upside down and half of your sample is gone.
14) Suck up too much solution into your pipettors, and you don't realize that you need to change the filter for the pipettor to work again. You desperately search for different pipettors (Novice undergrad me).
15) Grab a plastic container holding some type of chemical powder, for it to randomly break and the powder floats everywhere, including your face (Thankfully I was wearing a mask).
16) Want to do a big experiment and your cell culture decides to not cooperate and dies.
17) Use a multichannel pipettor and you don't get all the tips so you miss a few wells.
18) Try to pipette a bunch of different samples and someone comes to have a conversation with you. Then you completely forget what you were doing.
19) Dump the supernatant that you were actually supposed to collect.
20) Go back to your lab notebook and wish past you was better at recording everything.
21) Add DAPI to live cells instead of Hoescht (Oh, my poor cells).
22) Realize reagents are missing on the day of your experiment.
23) Miss controls in your experiment so your data is not interpretable.
24) Have no idea what you are doing!!!
Keep calm and PhD on :)
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