It has taken long enough. It looks like I finally learned how to clone.

Getting into the scheme of things in the lab takes a while. I am learning most of my work from scratch. Although in my previous lab I've done some molecular work (for DNA fingerprinting of wild fungi isolates) that work does not extend beyond DNA extraction or prep, running a PCR, and then running a gel.

I love all the new things I'm learning. You can add restriction sites to primers?? You can make PCR product essentially be primers in an overlap PCR??? This is new and exciting to me. Software that can help me make plasmid maps? I can spend all night playing with it!

Know why I am finally getting some of this to work? Because I've been sleeping. Yes dears you will learn in your first semester how badly you perform if you lack sleep. Worse of all, is the anxiety that keeps you from going to bed.

Over winter break I made a major resolution, which is to become a healthier graduate student. This means getting sleep each and every night. With only 2 exceptions I held that promise to myself true. One of the times I did not, I was subjected to miserable humiliation giving a presentation when I couldn't follow anything anybody was asking me, or what the professor was saying when explained things I clearly didn't understand. Granted, I was also extremely sick with a bad cold that week and had gotten over a massive stomach flu. It was not pretty. ANYWAYS. Rule of thumb: get sleep. You won't be sorry.

But it's not so much the failures I suffer through while sleep deprived that teaches me to get sleep: it's the little, tiny success I have when I do complete a project, fully alert and focused. Fewer mistakes are made. It's far easier to communicate with people.

My sleep schedule isn't perfect. It needs serious improvement. Lately it's been a 2AM to 10AM thing and I roll into the lab around noon. As a result, I rarely get out of the lab before 10PM and the cycle continues. My next "personal" goal thingy is to fix that. I prefer to do the 10-6 or 10-8 lab schedule. But this is better than last semester, where my classes started no later than 8:30AM.

My next academic goal is one that's been eluding me all year: score at least an average score on a test. It seems no matter how much I study or how well I know the material, I just don't get it all down. I have a test next week. Today was my last "full day" in the lab I allotted for the spring break, my Dad's coming tomorrow, so I get to spend time with him, but that doesn't leave me much time to study unfortunately. It's a bit stressful. I'll figure it out, I guess.