Not only did I find a link to here when looking on Google for something else (how very meta), but I took some time to look back a bit. The article that caught my eye was from 2011 about my experience in the lab. What was notable to me was how much my lab experience changed in the 3 years since that was written.At the time, I was doing a lot of the prep work – picking, weighing, sorting, and loading the forams. When I was running samples at LDEO, however, it was under close supervision. Going through the results was a very collaborative process.
My latest few batches of … wow, several hundred forams were run with the help of Emilie Dassié (post-doc) and Wei Huang (lab manager) up at LDEO, but I was running them on my own on the Isoprime, and doing everything short of pushing the “go” button for the Kiel. I ran samples, then presented the corrected and reviewed results to my advisor (and I think I might still owe him a spreadsheet or 2). Not only did I spend a lot of time in the lab generating data, but I actually learned how these things work – the intricacies of the Isoprime (hello, watching acid drip and looking for leaks), reference gas recharge and fractionation, editing methods for small samples on the Kiel, etc. We even did a little experiment in validating internal standards! Last year, at AGU, I was talking about the differences between the Kiel and Isoprime with some folks who have their own labs.
I’m glad I read back – there are times when, in writing this dissertation, it’s easy to forget about all of the things that have happened in the last few years, and how far you’ve come along the way.
