i've started the second month of lab rotations for my phd program.
i made a choice that surprised myself (mostly because i didn't do
my research beforehand) and ended up in a primarily wet lab for
this month. that's all fine, except that i really am not used to
having to come into a place on a schedule to get work done. i had
about three years of remote work and pretty much all of my
meaningful progress in that was done between 11 pm and 3 am. 

but, it's been fun. everyone in the lab is very nice - though
understandably annoyed they have to take time to show me stuff
knowing i probably won't stay long-term with them. so far i've
gotten to make microfluidics chips, do cell imaging for gfp and
mcherry, and handle some heLa cells. the PI comes back tomorrow
after being out of town for my first week-ish there, so i'm
interested to see how the vibes change tomorrow. i'm really trying
to be more self-sustaining in there so i'm not bothering people to
give me bullshit tasks, but it's one of those things where there's
really nothing reasonable i could think to do unless someone tells
me. i'm just too new. hopefully i'll have a better grasp in the
next week-ish. 

i had a machine learning exam today. it went awfully. i wouldn't
care if it weren't for the need to get at least a B to stay in the
program. i'm assuming there's some thing where if someone gets a C
or something they're not kicked out, they just have to retake it.
at least i'm hoping that's the case because i really did not do
well on that exam. even if it weren't for the lack of time, i just
did not know how to answer a lot of the questions. i wish this
class were only homeworks because i can figure those out and have
learned a lot doing so. i'm trying not to mentally play out the
worst case scenario too much, but that's all i've been doing
anyway. 

back to lab stuff. since it is a wet lab, basically all of my
skills i've developed for the past 3 years of research are not only
not helpful to, but are actively making it harder to do things.
mostly just technology-wise. i don't want to use all these awful
scientific softwares and it feels so incredibly wrong to adjust
some massive and horribly-running program to just barely get what
we want (with a ton of manual annotation) instead of just writing
our own tools to do it. 

anyway. ana's been sick the past couple days and i'm shocked i
haven't caught anything. i was kind of hoping that today i'd be
sick enough to get out of the exam, but that didn't happen.