Beginner’s Jitters
Today was the first working day of my first lab rotation.
A bit about the rotation system. Biology graduate schools tend to have a system in which, for the first year or so, graduate students formally try out a couple (usually three) different labs, doing miniprojects and getting a feel for the work and the people in each lab. It’s a great system, because it helps prevent gross personality mismatches between advisors, labs, and new graduate students (and having a good match with an advisor and his/her lab is probably the most important determinant of happiness in graduate school). In fact, I thought rotations were so obviously good that all fields did them, but surprisingly, they seem to be a relatively uncommon phenomenon. I know chemistry doesn’t do them, and apparently engineering doesn’t either. I assume physics doesn’t? Very strange. My professor was an engineering professor, and he hadn’t even heard of the rotation system. For me, I just can’t fathom joining a lab without rotations. With the advisor being such a make-or-break part of graduate school, rotations seem like such a essential part of the experience.
Anyway, this was my first time doing work in yeast, and really the first time in a while that I’ve done biology labwork (before, I did a lot of synthetic organic chemistry). And as I relearn things like sterile techniques, it reminds me of when I first learned about how to do chemistry without contamination from water or oxygen. It was essentially beginner’s jitters.
When I first started working in an organic chemistry lab, I was ultra-paranoid about having water ruin my reaction, or oxygen silently poisoning my transition metal catalysts. I concentrated very hard every time I had to transfer material from one flask to another (in a syringe, or with a metal-tube syphon), carefully checking and rechecking to make sure unreactive argon or nitrogen gas was protecting my chemicals from oxygen and water. But after some time, it just became second nature. I wasn’t as paranoid, because I became relatively confident about my experimental technique. I wasn’t less careful, but it didn’t require my consciously going through a mental checklist of what to do next (”flush the needle, take up the compound, suck in some argon, remove, stick the needle in before air gets through, stick the needle in!”). I just did it. I knew what would and would not contaminate my chemicals, and I didn’t have to worry as much.
But now I’m back with the beginner’s jitters, the paranoia of having my sterile solutions get contaminated by random bacteria or yeast getting blown around in the air. Every time I have to pipette something from one container to another, I get flustered and worried (”Did I hold the container open too long? Make sure I’m not touching anything. Close the cap, close the cap!”). But it’ll soon pass and become second nature, I expect, just as the dry and airless techniques I learned in chemistry soon became second nature.
But for the time being, I have beginner’s jitters, and a strange interesting feeling.
