Putting the "Re” in Research
Nov 4, 2007 commentary
Long-time readers may remember a time at which I mentioned that I was working on writing my first peer-reviewed research publication. Since then, I don’t think that I’ve mentioned it again. Well, to make a long story short, that work was put on the back burner, but is about to begin again, after repeating a series of experiments that was required after a previous result called for it.
All of this means that I won’t get to accomplish as much as I would have liked to as an undergraduate researcher, but it provides a much needed lesson for a researcher in training: this is how you can expect it to go. One of the former postdocs in the lab liked to say, “That’s the ‘re’ in research,” which isn’t the best thing to hear right after you learn that you’ll be repeating the experiment you just completed after months of work. Nevertheless, I can imagine that learning and accepting this reality even before I begin my graduate research will be a tremendous benefit in my future endeavors.
On a brighter note, shortly after arriving in the Skinner lab in 2004, I was involved in another project that now looks to be published in the next 3-4 months. That will be my first authorship in a peer-reviewed journal, and since it doesn’t relate to epigenetics, I doubt I will acknowledge it here when it finally does hit the press. But it does represent a major milestone in what I hope will be a future career in research, and at the very least, for that I can feel some sense of accomplishment.
