made idiotic mistake- What to do now? - My supervisor is too nice for me. (Dec/07/2009 )
adrian kohsf on Dec 9 2009, 10:50 AM said:
Nabi on Dec 9 2009, 11:20 AM said:
猿も木から落ちる
I appreciate ur boss's patience very much.
I don't think U deserve any kind of punishment. This is a lesson for U to work more carefully and someday forgive any of your junior's mistake the same way Ur boss did yours.
you mean:" even monkey fall from trees?"
nice...I thought I read it banana....
..... that's ok. Monkeys follow banana.
Nabi on Dec 10 2009, 03:22 AM said:
...actually the only word I can read without the help of our omniscient google is から--from.....Adrian shld teach us japanese.... yeah, we should have Japanese lesson thread also.
lotus on Tue Dec 8 00:00:32 2009 said:
I am a technician in a lab on a good pay level. About a couple of months ago, I made a plasmid construct. I sent it to sequence. When the sequences came back I just glanced through them and it seemed okay and I told my supervisor that the construct was successfully made. I also gave the DNA to a post-doc to be injected into C elegans for further experiments. Injection is back-breaking work and the post-doc spent days on my plasmid.
Only today I had chance to analyze the sequencing data in detail and I found (to my horror) that the plasmid doesn't contain the insert at all. It is simply uncut vector. It was sheer stupidity on my part to not have realized this all those months ago. I immediately informed my supervisor and the post-doc. My supervisor took it very nicely and said we could discuss it in detail later and that I should not worry too much about it and should proceed with my other experiments.
I would have felt better if he had given me a tongue-lashing. I feel like a moron for making such a stupid mistake and also causing trouble for our post-doc and wasting her time.
What should I do in this situation? I am so embarrased right now. Somehow my boss' politeness has made me feel more like an idiot than ever. I feel he should punish me in some way or other, like cutting my salary or something. Should I approach him and tell him what I think? I would be glad of some advice.Has anyone else ever been in a similar position?
I've made so many mistakes that if I was in any other field, I'd probably be fired a long time ago.... One of my supervisors during my Masters did sometyhing similar in that she helped me construct a primer that she should now wouldn't work, because it didn't contain a 5'overhang. Took me three months to figure out why it didn't work. Never held it against her though, as I now I would do something similar myself in the future. Holding a grudge dosen't help with anything anyways.
I just did something similar, though it only cost money and my own time. The best you can do is point out your mistake as soon as you notice it and do whatever you can to fix the problem. My boss always says, "Come to me with solutions, not problems."
briguy7 on Wed Sep 21 21:08:57 2011 said:
I just did something similar, though it only cost money and my own time. The best you can do is point out your mistake as soon as you notice it and do whatever you can to fix the problem. My boss always says, "Come to me with solutions, not problems."
I will answer your boss:
If I got the solutions, I will not come to you.
Good one Adrian.
But to be honest, I like what briguy's boss says, come with solutions.
It simply means that you have thought over it, found a way to overcome the problem.
Which is a really good thing to do for a student. The PI does not become the troubleshooter then and your dependency on him/her decreases.
Guess the PI should mainly be the infrastructure provider and at all times he just says "There is much you do not know about the pattern"
So, you work on this project and you will see a bit more of the bigger picture!