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!