Back in the lab!

I really will, one day soon, give a short synopsis of my time so far in grad school... but today I'm celebrating my return to the lab!

Actually I first made it back into the lab April 22, after a very long hiatus. I spent a few hours over a couple of days getting the samples organized, but then teaching responsibilities at the end of spring semester and the beginning of summer semester completely overwhelmed me, and so my reappearance was derailed - for ten weeks (TEN?!  Really?  I hadn't counted until just now - eek!).

There are two components to the lab work, identifying parasites (there are small ones and big ones) collected in the field, and creating genetic profiles for each individual I collected parasites from. The genetics will (hopefully) happen this fall. For now, I am finally identifying the small parasites.

The samples have been sitting on a counter near my desk waiting to be identified for well over a year now. I was pretty sure I had completely screwed up by leaving them for so long, but the parasitologist I'm working with hardly blinked when I told her how long it had been since I had done the initial sample prep. Yet another big sigh of relief on my part.

The samples now have a home in her lab,and are nearly ready to go under the microscope.  I am self-scheduled in again tomorrow morning for a few hours before meeting with my advisor at noon. Progress, no matter how small, feels so good right now.

My goal is to have the small parasites counted and identified by Friday, August 19th, just six weeks from Friday.  Forty-five days from today.  There are a lot of samples to make it through before then; it really is going to require quite a bit of focus to stay on schedule.

I am learning to create smaller goals to help my ADHD brain; the big goals somehow always seem to get put off until the last minute, and that really isn't an option here - too many hours at the microscope to wait until the last minute.  I need to break it down into some number of samples that I will finish each week. Or maybe even each day...

I've gone through a lot of scheduling, calendar, and to-do list systems.  My favorite so far has been the Un-Calendar, but even that one is no match for my abundant, often detailed, and always changing to-do lists. I'm not giving up my paper calendar, it works great for keeping me on schedule, among other things (as long as I remember to look at it), but I'm always up for trying something new, so I'm going to try Remember the Milk.

I learned about it from ADHD MD, a great blog created by a medical student who also has ADHD. She's a big fan, and the demands of medical school would put any system to the test, even without the added bonus of ADHD, so I think it's worth a try... If you're interested, check out her post, "Getting the Most out of Remember the Milk."  And if you use (or have used) Remember the Milk, I'd love to hear what you think about it.