One step forward, three steps back

I think my title says it all on how the methane mapping project has been progressing. “One step forward, three steps back” has become something of an inside joke between Deanna and myself each time we encounter a setback with the mapping project. I should outline, first of all, that we have been making significant progress. Since last posting, the roof mount has been fully assembled and welded, the weather station has been assembled, tested, and had code written to sort its data, as well as the wiring completed, and the Aeris Pico is running as we hoped. That being said, all of that progress seemed to come in waves, in between lulls of multiple days. This is the theme I’ve chosen to focus on this week.

One of the main struggles I have encountered as I have become more accustomed to research work is the abnormal flow of progress. Prior to my time working in Deanna’s lab, I worked for a tree service where my job was very task-oriented. I had production numbers to hit, jobs that needed to be completed each day, and I was able to measure and feel positively about my performance based on whether or not I hit those metrics. This is not the case for research, I have found. Many more factors of my ability to progress rely on people or processes I have no control over. This week, I had to wait on help with welding the AIRMAR (the weather sensor we’ve procured) roof mount before I was able to progress into threading it with the necessary wiring to operate the sensor while in the mount. My lab partner Kol and I were powerless to get the WeatherCaster software configured until IT was able to deduce how to download it onto the chemistry department laptops we are working with. Herman and I waited for three days to have R updated on our desktops to be able to work with the necessary code. These things happen, and as someone who is not overtly patient and likes to maintain a steady state of progress, I have at times found to cope with.

Furthermore, the work I am doing is what would refer to as grind-heavy work. What I mean to refer to here is work in which one must sort of beat their head against a task for days on end, only for it to come together very rapidly all at once. Coding is very much one of these sort of tasks. It took me nearly a week to wrap my head around mapping in R, and then all at once one Thursday afternoon I was able to crank out maps for 20 different data sets I had been given. This past few days I have been attempting to grind out code to sort the heavily ambiguous data set output by the AIRMAR. Two days ago, out of nowhere, I managed to get the data sets to load, and just as unexpectedly, I was able to create sorted output files for each type of data yesterday after hours of staring at the R console in frustration. This has just kind of been how things go in lab work, which I admit I had to account for as a possibility before I signed up for this experience. Still, I think it is something I needed to learn, as I do plan to continue on into some form of subsequent higher education and one of a few field options that will all replicate this work flow I believe.

I have also improved markedly in how I handle this sort of work, or so I think at least. I find I am naturally able to get into streaks of very high productivity, and this has always fueled my success in academics and previous jobs. Here, with so many factors out of my control, these streaks I get into get broken up when I least expect it. So I have adapted to enjoy the grind, to enjoy the challenge of either having to stare at a project for hours and hours knowing what success will lie ahead, or challenging myself to find something I can do to move forward even when it seems like progress is impossible.

In some actual chemistry news, it looks like Aeris is finally going to get a rough driving test run next week (!!), and I no longer feel nearly as foreign coding as I did for so long. Both myself and the project have come a long way in the last 5.5 weeks, and I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

‘Til next time,

Sean McLaughlin