First Day Back

April vacation was a nice break from everything but I was actually pretty excited to get back in CST and continue with my experiments. I only work until Thursday this week because Friday I'm leaving for Florida for DECA internationals! Today I did my second round of minipreps after completing a bunch of other stuff in between. After completing them I ran a gel to see if they were successful and it turns out that the DNA didn't cut! I had no idea what I had done wrong and was very disappointed. Jennifer (my supervisor) told me not to worry about it, that this was science and sometimes things just don't work out and you may not even be able to figure out why. We went back over the procedure together just to make sure I had done everything correctly and I realized that at one point I hadn't let something sit for a full minute when I was supposed to. It just goes to show that you have to play very close attention to detail and follow every step just as it is written or else your experiment won't turn out like you want it to. So feeling sad and unaccomplished I went home at the end of the day ready to do another set of minipreps in the morning. I guess in the future I'll read more carefully!