The more I read about the field I'm studying in grad school, the more I realize that my knowledge of this field is so ridiculously small.

It's not that I didn't expect this to be the case. Generally the more you learn, the more overwhelmed you are by how much you just don't know.

But these systems all have a lot of nuance, and it's a lot to wrap my head around. I assume much of the details will become second nature as I dive into projects and am surrounded by the terminology in lab meetings and have been reading these papers for many years...but as it stands I realize that I just don't know much at all.

In the past all my projects have been constrained by time; usually a summer, a semester, or (for my undergraduate thesis) an academic school year. This means that there is very little to loose, because it's obscene to expect that anyone gets results in 3-9 months. If you do, you're lucky. If you don't, you learn from the experience and that's what it's mainly about anyway at the undergraduate level.

Graduate school is going to be different, though. In graduate school, there's going to be time to see through a project to completion. I'm not going to abandon my babies half-finished. Of course, there's the whole idea of never really completing a project...and always having a follow-up project, but there will be five, maybe more years to make it work. And this is exciting and scary, because you never really have the excuse "oh I didn't have enough time to make it work."

It either gets finished or abandoned, I guess.

One of the few ways I know how to lift myself out of depression is to go to lab.

Of course, this strategy is somewhat less effective if you're working and working and never seeing any results...but even the act of working towards a result can help me sometimes.

I was feeling overwhelmed about various personal things in my life, many of them related to anxieties about moving and starting a new phase in my life. Right now I'm kind of still working in my undergrad lab in a very low-expectation, lackadaisical kind of way, and I very nearly didn't go in at all because I was feeling kind of shitty.

I finally got up the energy to go in at around 3 pm to check up on some stuff, and I realized a ligation had worked when I screened it by PCR. It was one of those surprise ligations where only one colony on the plate grows, but that one transformant is the right transformat. It was enough to lift me out of my funk.

So...after dinner I came back and started working on this more. Re-doing the ligation that didn't work, and transforming the miniprep of the ligation that did work into an expression strain. I'm going to be here until 10 pm. It's totally illogical for me to be working like this. I should be coming in at 9 like a normal person. And for that matter, even if I do get a soluble expression of this protein, I'm leaving town in less than two weeks. There's not enough time for me to play with this.

But I can't help myself. I have to do that transformation. I have to see.

It's an addiction.