Third Month

I must admit that I am very grateful to this program, sue to all the knowledge that I was able to gain. My mentor has exposed my partner and myself to all the basic techniques involving micropropagation and tissue culture. Something really amazing that has occur in this month is that thanks to a little mistake we are about to discover something (which of course I can not tell you). We are still making adjustments in our procedure, but I think we are very close at finally determine the optimum one.

To tell the truth not everything was like this, especially at the beginning. I consider myself a person of little patience and you can say that this semester has tested me a lot. As I stated earlier in the other blog post, I believe that my greatest challenge was to get used to the investigation itself, especially in the part of research. First, I was really hard for me to adapt myself in my mentor’s methodology. It contrasted greatly with my idea of it. It reached to the point that just thinking of my research provoked me stress. Before let things get any worse, I fill myself in courage and decided to tell the mentor how I felt. Thankfully, we were able to clear things up and everything turned out great. So communication is very important factor when doing an investigation along with other people. Concerning the research, our repeated failures thanks to contamination did not wake up feelings of joy in me. Believe me, it is very frustrating you keep something several times and no matter how careful you are things end up contaminated. It feels like you’re stuck and there’s no on moving on. One of the most important things that I was able to comprehend was that one can not expect to have perfect results always. Our mentor once told us that part of doing research is to be wrong; to commit mistakes. Otherwise it wouldn’t be research. He also indicated that many times mistakes have lead many scientists to make the greatest discoveries. His words were very comforting and made us wonder that our mistakes could lead us also to important discoveries and as matter of fact, we are about to make one. We only need to do some test before making any conclusions.      

My primordial expectation for the next semester is to improve my skills in doing research. I believe that this could help me find or determine other procedures that could be incorporated in our project and hopefully they will give better results compared to the ones we are having now.

~ by jctec on April 25, 2008.