I suck at research

bopper
Tue, 04 Jun 2019 14:42:39 +0000

Maybe you do suck at research. or maybe you are a newbie at research. Or maybe you don’t have good eye/hand coordination. Or maybe you just need more practice. Maybe nobody taught you properly.

But let this be a chance to work on your self-advocacy skills.

“PI, I am not being successful at the experiments and I would like to ask for advice on how to improve my results.
I am having trouble with pipetting…do you have thoughts on how best to practice that?
Also I am not fast enough at task Z and an unable to get the machine readings. Any tips?”

No matter what you do in life, you will be in situations where you are not able to easily do the task.
Employers would rather have people that realize they are having trouble and ask for help/training than people who keep quiet and screw up and surprise the boss.