Many undergraduate students might have some idea of what research is like based on what they hear in their lecture classes. You go into the lab, conduct your experiments, collect data, and publish your results that eventually make it into textbooks. Usually, these textbooks leave out the numerous amounts of hurdles one had to go through in order to finally get to the end product. Everyone would be a scientist if it were as easy as going into the lab, conducting the experiment, and finding the desired/predicted results. This is where research gets frustrating and complicated.

I have personally experienced this level of frustration when I recently found some of my RNA interference (RNAi) plates contaminated with many small bacterial colonies. This contamination makes those plates useless. When I first noticed the contamination, I was about to loose it because I just thought about the number of hours that went to waste, but decided to keep calm and address the situation. I noticed that this contamination was only on RNAi plates that were being used as the control of my experiment. This means that I can still carry out the experiment with the uninfected plates, but simply need to repeat the set up of my control RNAi plates. This process of setting up the plates usually takes about one week. Although I am set back one week from getting my results, I do what I can with the situation as well as try to find the source of the issue in order to avoid a similar scenario in the future. The contamination of these small colonies is in the pictures below.

Sometimes when experiments do not go the way you thought it would, conducting research may seem like the exaggerated title of this post. The reason why people continue to stay in research is because of two reasons. One reasons is because of how amazing it feels to be able to attain that “1% success/expected results” after all of that hard work and dedication. The second reason is because of the innumerable, creative ways one can take the “99% failed/odd results” and make that the focus of their study. This is especially true in my case. For example, I had not expected to find expression of intestinal fibers in the muscle cells of my C. elegans worms. It is unexpected result like this that usually leads to the most interesting experiments.

The intent of this post is simply to let you know…yes…YOU, the undergraduate researcher (or soon to be researcher)…that you need to embrace all aspects of the research experience. That includes the amazing feeling of success and the dreaded feeling of failure. Embrace these feelings and learn from each of those experiences in order to not only be a better scientists, but also a more vigilant and open minded individual who is willing to take on a challenge.