Patience is a Virtue

It has become increasingly evident since the start of my research internship that one vital skill that each & every research scientist, no matter the field, must possess is PATIENCE. My life experiences won't allow me to presume that doing research is comparable to raising a child, but I will reach and claim that working in and out of the lab is similar to cultivating a needy plant (at least for us without green thumbs). Without patience, diliigence, some background knowledge, and a lot of time and effort, you will have little to show for your work.

Usually when I work on projects, I maybe bite off more than I can chew. But this usually works out in my favor, as I am also stubborn, and that means I can usually get what I want to get done done. I am now in unfamiliar territory, because I cannot purely muscle my way through a task but putting a few extra hours in here and there. Some days, I wait for my data curves to load on my server and tediously click on different chemical compounds to double check if their information is represented well by various computer programs for hours and hours at a time. And at the end of the day, the hundred of compounds and samples I have checked may not show much that seems conclusive to me, or they may not upload correctly onto the server, and it feels like a Sisyphean task.

Unlike Sisyphus, though, I am making progress. Slowly. And not necessarily the type of progress I anticipated, with fast and easily-interpreted results. But hopefully, with a little more patience, the work I am doing will serve to help my department make different methods of environmental sampling and analysis more commonplace.