Ups and Downs

It's been nothing short of hectic in recent times, with many ups and downs. The "Ups" include having my friends and my dear sister visit, a sojourn to America's best restaurant, Alinea, seeing my cousin graduate and catching up with her family in Boston, running along the magnificent Charles River and having my business plan enter the final round of competition at Northwestern University. Unfortunately, the "Downs" were plentiful also. My camera died when I was at Alinea, resulting in no pictures from a wonderful evening of Chef Achatz's degustation. My business plan didn't place at all in the competition. And I think I'm hit the hardest by the fact that a lab technique that I've been working on the last year or so is just not working. This means that I will probably have to use the service of a core facility to develop it for me. Now, why didn't we do that in the first place? That's another long story that boils down to economics.

I'm sorry for being such a downer. I think I feel so down just because I haven't been spending as much time in the kitchen as I would like to. Oftentime (maybe too often), I question my career decision again and again. Maybe I should've gone into something simpler or more structured, like medicine or business. I admire those who instead of fretting about the challenges of science, actually relish and enjoy it, saying that the things that are worth doing are the most difficult ones. It's just difficult for me to have that point of view when graduate school has just been beating me down for the past few years. Is it too much to ask for a little bit of success in my experiments? Is it?