Lab crazy

As I mentioned before I am graduating this June. That means that at the minute I am deep in the hell known as 4th year research project.

The HORROR!

You can imagine that this is not something I relish doing. Lab work was supposed to be this fun thing where I could pretend to be a real scientist and look at fun coloured chemicals whilst making scientific progress that would change the world!!

ooh test tubes!

ooh beakers!

ooh look I'm all serious about SCIENCE

Eating computer will help me figure it out!

Yeah thats kind of what I thought it would be like. Instead I get this.

Nothing works!

These are the wonderful animals I get to work with. gross

And this is what they look like when they die.

Nothing I do works. Every experiment fails or produces results that makes no sense and most of my day is spent waiting around for cells to incubate or doing repetitive procedures 100 times in a row.

Naturally I get bored, and when I got bored I tried to find things to do with my time. The first thing I did was start making patterns in my Pipette tip boxes. . .

Loveheart!

Casette tape!

Diagonal pattern things!

Spirals!

Yeah I actually got so bored I started to find this interesting. . . I need a life again.

Then I started talking to my worms. I asked them very nicely not to crawl out of the petri dishes, and the ones who valiantly escaped were named Roger and placed in the control group to escape a gruesome death by infection. There is no way to state that fact without sounding like a lunatic; maybe I should get out of the house. . . .

OH WAIT. I cant because after my labs I have to write up all of my experiments in my lab book and do calculations and plan the next day (which normally involves repeating something that failed from the day before) and then by that time I'm too tired and stroppy to do anything but laze on the sofa watching house and shoving my face with oreos.

So yes the life of a dissertation student is hard, but the end is near! and at least on occasion I can escape at the weekend by seeing a friend for coffee, or staying up late to write a blog post (the best form of procrastination I have ever found by the way, I may even blog about procrastination to get really meta)

Now I'm off to go crunch some more numbers for tomorrow, see you next time!

love Frankles

xxx