Grace and Ben

I broke a sample inside the EPR tonight. Everything was going so smoothly and I got some beautiful spectra. Then, when I went to take out my EPR sample, I found that it was broken in half. I was very alarmed. I didn’t know what to do. I knew that part of the instrument was still under vacuum and I wasn’t certain what to do about it. Thankfully, an experienced EPR-user was answering her cell phone on a Friday night and told me which pumps to turn off and in what order.

My postdoc has definitely been a humbling experience. In my post yesterday, I set up my computer to print to a printer. You’d think I grew up in the pre-computer era, but I started using them in 3rd grade. Yesterday, I was ready to ask for help after working at it for 1 hour and generating lots of junk printouts. However, I didn’t ask for help initially because one of the Stone lab members had written a detailed email about how to set it up and I tried to follow them to a tee, but after doing it multiple times, eventually I found the correct settings.

I’ve had to ask for help on many other elementary issues in the last five months–how and where can I print a poster? How and when can I get reimbursed for attending a scientific conference? I also had to re-learn things I thought I already knew, like how to measure pH or make a buffer or calculate ionic strength or calculate the reaction rate constant (ironic because a large portion of my Ph.D. thesis was focused on reactions kinetics).

One day at a time, but some days are downright difficult, not matter how positive an attitude I had going into it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Baltimore, Grace's Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.