Scientific Success: 3 Tips For Working In a Lab

Whether you’re working in a lab with groups of students or are doing scientific research professionally, laboratory projects need to be handled with the utmost care. Many of these tasks involve research that could potentially lead to revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, possibly even saving lives down the road.

Scientific and laboratory studies involve taking a look at how medications affect the human body, how viruses can be prevented, geological findings, and everything in-between.

Whatever stage you’re at in your career, if you’re performing research or working in a laboratory, you need to take it seriously. Here are some tips that should help you succeed in the lab throughout your scientific career:

• • Get plenty of laboratory notebooks — Since you’ll need to annotate every single move you make throughout your research project, you need high quality laboratory notebooks to do so. You’ll sometimes need to compare your day one notes with a new discovery you make years down the road, so be sure to have plenty of research notebooks and never throw any of your valuable information out.

• • You have to remain patient — Laboratory and scientific work isn’t exactly the fastest method of study, and it shouldn’t be. If you are solving problems in a matter of days, you’re probably not solving anything. For instance, it takes anywhere from 10 to 15 years to develop a new vaccine or medication — if you’re lucky. You need to constantly remind yourself to remain patient and continue to put in the necessary work in order to one day maybe reach a breakthrough discovery.

• • Know how to fail — In addition to being patient, having the ability to accept failure and move on to the next research opportunity is just as important within the scientific community. You’re going to fail at some point, there is no doubt about it. But you can’t let that failure deter you from gathering up all your notes, getting back into the lab, and starting over. No successful scientist or lab worker has a success rate even close to 100%. You’ll fail, you’ll fail some more, but keep at it, because eventually you will succeed.

If you want to learn more about succeeding in the scientific community and find quality research notebooks and laboratory notebooks, give Scientific Notebook Company a call right away.