The end of the experiment

Well today was a milestone for me, the end of an experiment I wasn’t too excited to do in the first place! Of course, now comes the semi-difficult part. I need to process the data, draw some conclusions, probably publish a few papers, and get a presentation made. Things need to happen quickly too, so while I’m done, I’m not. At least, not yet.

For those of you who don’t know, I had some funding come to me, but it also came with an experiment. I wasn’t looking forward to it, it wasn’t what I wanted to do and frankly I think it could’ve been designed better, but after what feels like forever, I’ve finally finished it.

Originally we kicked this off prior to COVID starting, but since the pandemic hit we had a few months of doing pretty much nothing. I was also tasked with doing some data processing that I would’ve only done the once, but luckily that was scrapped because of the (forced) break we took. That was just about the only good thing that came out of all of this mess.

While I wish that would be the end of the story, there are still a few loose ends that need to be tied up and more importantly a lot of data processing. We, and by that I mean I, have a due date, December. Despite the COVID situation, that would put me right on track so that would be the ideal situation and probably help put my main PI in a better mood.

So now I have a month to make sense of everything I’ve collected and I’m a little nervous to see what kind of a mess I have waiting for me. If you’ve already guessed it, for the next month I’m primarily going to be complaining about my stupid data problems. They are definitely coming, I already know it’s coming.

Point of today? I guess that forward progress is progress, but that progress can make other problems. Yeah, that sounds about right.