The day you finally get data from your research is very exciting. However, obtaining the data is only the first step in the research process. Analyzing it is actually the hardest part, and can be very frustrating at times.

This summer, I am doing research in professor Meiburg’s lab using numerical simulations to model the flow of particles in a dense suspension experiencing shear forces. My part of the project is to write Matlab programs to perform a statistical analysis of the data output by the simulations. I began my work using a random distribution to test my programs, while my mentor, a post-doctoral student, prepared the simulations. At the end of my fourth week in the lab, we finally got the data from the simulation. I was very excited and hopeful that all of our hard work would pay off and we would immediately discover something. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The most challenging part of my work was yet to come: analyzing the data.

Several of the programs I had written that worked perfectly with the random distribution needed to be modified to work with the actual data. When I got those programs to work, I once again got excited. However, results don’t suddenly appear when you run a statistical calculation. My mentor and I spent many painstaking hours analyzing the statistical graphs to determine what they conclude about the data. The general conclusion was that we needed to run the simulation for a longer amount of time to collect more data.

Once we got the new data, I ran the statistical calculations again. As before, the results were not clear. This time, my mentor concluded that we needed to do more calculations to determine if the results from the previous calculations were meaningful. At this point, I began to get frustrated. I had not realized that drawing conclusions about data could be such a long and difficult process. However, I wrote the programs to perform this next set of calculations, and continued to hope that these calculations would reveal some interesting conclusions about the data.

I learned several important lessons from this experience. The research process often takes months, or even years, to draw conclusions and make discoveries. So do not think that you can make a big discovery in a few weeks, as I did. Enjoy the excitement of obtaining data, but do not be too disappointed or frustrated when things do not work or turn out the way you expected. Most importantly, continue working and trying different techniques, and don’t give up.