SCIENTISTS RESEARCH SCENARIOS : PRECIS

WHEN I spent a semester working as an undergraduate researcher in an immunology lab at Virginia Tech, I watched the graduate students and postdocs I worked alongside spend up to 70 hours a week toiling on projects.

THEY spent most of the day on their feet, paying meticulous attention to their experiments and trudging from one-time consuming task to another, whether it was calibrating delicate instruments to measure faint traces of chemicals-

Or setting up and running bacteria culture experiments governed by rigid safety protocols, cleaning supplies and lugging heavy equipment from location to location, preparing reagents the entire lab needed, analyzing data or simply keeping the laboratory cleaned and organized.

Experiments run into obstacles and failure all the time, and researchers must devote weeks, months or even years trying to troubleshoot what went wrong so they can move forward to the next step.

They build resilience not just against seemingly constant discouragements, but also against the pressure testing of their ideas from mentors, peers and outside scientists.

Success sometimes feels hardly more likely than winning the lottery.

The World Students Society thanks Neel V. Patel.