When I was in graduate school, I did a set of experiments where I get replicates by repeating the same tests over. I was supposed to keep my samples at 24.5 C on the shaker for 24 hours and sample at time 0, 8 and 24 hours.
The first set of tests went perfectly as planned. The second, though, not exactly. I forgot to put my samples back on the shaker after I took them out at 8 hours for readings. In the last run, I realized after I made my samples that the shaker was occupied. So, the samples were out at the lab bench for the whole 24 hours.
I hoped that the difference between room temperature and 24.5 C, and having the samples stationary versus shaking won’t make much of a difference. I did stats on my 3 runs to see whether the runs were different. I must admit that I was sloppy, and when it appeared that the runs were not different, I did not look closer at the data. I went ahead and used them as triplicates.
Little did I know that I’d waste many hours of work because of this carelessness. Many of my plots did not make sense. My advisor and I were perplexed by how much the measurements scattered. He eventually told me to go back to my lab notebook and see whether the three runs were in exact same conditions. I did, and I remembered what I forgot: my work was flawed.
I eventually had to leave out all of my measurements from the third run, and the 24-hours measurements for the first and second runs. My test was then an 8-hours study with duplicates, instead of 24-hours with triplicates. After I did that, everything made sense. Then, it was time to face my advisor what happened.
I was very lucky to have a great advisor. I could not imagine anyone to be as forgiving; I was not even that nice to myself. I realized that I had depression during graduate school, and eventually had to tell my advisor about it because my poor performance. He ended up being more supportive than I was to myself.
He did point out, though, how much of a waste of time it was. And how stupid it has been for me to try to use those data, knowing that the conditions were not the same.
That was probably not the first time I did something like that. I had always have the habit of trying to BS “a little” in hope of achieving something better than what I have for sure in my hands. In general, it is hard to conclude whether I’m suffering because of my negligence. In experiments, I have records of everything. But in real life where not everything is documented, how could I remember when I screwed up?
The solution is probably to be careful all the time. Don’t think that a little BS here and there, or “just this one time” is okay. I ended up having to redo a lot of my work, when my advisor said that I should have just stopped after I realized that I screwed up.
In a way, it’s like being an over-achiever, but not all the way. As a result, it became stupid.
I wonder, how many of you have had this kind of experience? And when did you realize it was happening?
Happy Old Maid 