Hi everyone,

I am a Master of Science student at a public university and this is my predicament in research.

Having been studying for the past 1 1/2 years, I am starting to feel as if I am losing motivation and becoming stuck in a phase of my research without moving much forward. Very often this is frustrating because I could not obtain a good enough results - feeling like I am wasting much precious time and I am starting to wonder if my methods work or if I am really cut out to be a researcher. Lab has begun to feel like a chore; repeating same things everyday without much progress.

I am hoping to find some light here; wondering if there are people out there who are currently in scientific research or studying a research degree who can share their experiences and enlighten me on how to get out of a research rut - thanks for reading and thank you very much for sharing!

You’ve settled comfortably into your lab routine: you’ve established your goals and objectives, your research project is well underway, and you’ve been carrying out experiments for several months. You feel good about your progress and are convinced that you’re on the right track. You’ve mastered the concept of thinking like a scientist by working through the classic progression of hypothesis, experiment, and results, and you are feeling confident that you have a good handle on your project and your life as a graduate student. Each month you have faithfully filled in the Monthly Progress Monitor and you’re keeping open the lines of communication with your supervisor and colleagues. So everything is wonderful. Right? Wrong. Because one day you realize that nothing is working.

Your carefully planned experiments are not giving you the results you expected or need. Your cell cultures have become contaminated for the umpteenth time. Your thermal cycler (PCR machine) or the High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) or the UV Spectrometer breaks down. Again. You can’t get your chemical compounds to crystallize or you’ve injected your laboratory mice with a mislabeled syringe and they all die. Weeks or months of data are lost. To top it off, you find out that you’ve made a mistake in your statistical calculations and a year’s worth of experiments are worthless. Gather a group of seasoned scientists together in one room and they will tell you horror stories like these and more. When something like this happens to you (and in all likelihood it will), what do you do, how do you cope?

Setbacks in the lab, as well as in life, are inevitable. It’s how we deal with them that will turn a setback into an opportunity for growth. Have you consulted Blofeld and jonoave? They can probably give you some good advices!

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This post has been edited by dkk: Mar 21 2014, 12:37 AM

Lol, thanks for the compliment Critical_Fallacy though i'm not sure how much of a help I could give. Do you patrol this education forum every day?

To the OP, it's quite common and I bet every single student doing graduate studies (especially in natural science) has encountered during research, and will continue to encounter throughout his/her research career. There will be times when everything is going well, all the results are positive and you're motivated to keep going.

And then there is the other end like where you are now.

My first suggestion to you is to immediately stop whatever experiment you're doing. You're tired, demotivated and not focus. You're running it just because that's what you're supposed to do. I'm quite sure you're pretty sick of looking at the experiment setup, parameters and preparation and are just running through the motions. In other words, you're just repeating whatever that was not previously working. This is equivalent to proofreading your thesis so many times that your eyes tend to skip over words and overlook obvious typos.

Take a break. Take the weekend or a few days off. Go on a holiday or hang out at the mall. Don't think about your research for a few days. Go meet up with your friends. Or even simply just get a haircut or change your hair! As you acknowledged that you're stuck in a rut! Even small changes will have amazing effects.

Once you come back refreshed, relook your experiment from the start, not just from the previous step. Make sure you understand the theory and rationale behind it. If the theory is fine, what about the preparation and the steps? Has anyone done this before in your department? Or look for help online: try posting in scientific forums e.g. researchgate or protocols forum etc.

Or you can try to run the experiment again, starting from scratch. New fresh samples, new reagents, sterilised and clean pipettes, clean or different machines etc. Or even ask your someone else in the lab to do the protocol for you to make sure it's not your hands or something obvious that you inadvertently overlook.

Are there any alternative methods to your experiment? Is it possible to conduct this alternative method? Can it be outsourced to a research service company? Sometimes spending a bit more money is worth it rather than repeating an experiment by yourself and wasting reagents while not yielding any result.

Whether you're cut out to be a researcher, is not a matter of luck alone. It boils down a lot to your passion and aptitude. Remember that you're not alone, you should always discuss any major problems with the people in your lab or your boss. Be firm to your boss, if he/she just says "Just repeat it. It will work." Seek help and advice from other people in the lab, some of them might have more experience and knowledge at a certain protocols compared to your boss.

Good luck!

I wish I can help but I'm from a different field.

All we need to do is to keep on reading until we find a theoretical gap.

Dun take things too hard on yourself. Take sometime off..but not too long, and when u come back freshen up, hopefully u'll get new insights again. Talking with ppl in the field of ur research helps too.

Guess im not alone here.

same here, its actually normal

It happens to Computer Science field too. I was too into the mathematical side to prove it for like 1 month+. Until my sv told me 1 day, it's ur research, it's ur field, u can come out with theories and rules, don't restrain urself to just proving it mathematically. Try it practically 1st, draw out the Petri Net and try to convert to Sequence Diagram. THat's when I realize, no matter how i prove it mathematically, if someone gives me a Petri Net, I still nid to be able to convert it to Sequence Diagram by hand drawing.

He really help a lot. Maybe u can try talking to ur sv.

Gud luck brah.

Scientific research is a process to restructure your mind with scientific thinking. The findings in the master and PhD levels are mostly insignificant. You are in the trainning to create new knowledges, not intuitively but scientifically. Common process. Many times to give up. Scientific research should not be difficult. Difficulties are not the aim of research. The entire process of the game is to ceate new knowledge. You should tune yourself at a difficult level, which you can sustain. Most importantly, build up trust with your supervisor. If your supervisor don't know how to do research, you will have nightmare to understand what is research.

Check the Chartered Scientist status in UK. You will get more idea.