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RE: Throwback times: My shittiest lab method
Oh man... Once I've seen that you needed to heat and cool in cycles it sounded like a really, really bad idea. Many times, I can't believe that something as intuitive as that can't be understood by the "boss" with several decades of experience. And changing the electrodes with the presumption that it will somehow be exactly the same every time was a brave idea.
There is also one more thing the "boss" often forgets: what is the change you are expecting? What is the accuracy/ precision of the device? Is that experiment repeatable?
You have found the new phenomenon of ageing. You deserve the grade 6 (on the scale 1-5) and that "boss" who gave you the untested idea should be fired.
Actually we did the heating cycles for the NMR samples as well - and the NMR spectrometers were used by almost everybody in the group so my delay caused the planned schedule to change which contributed to the grade too, I think. The results were more or less the same and I felt unable to decide for the type of motion happening in the crystal (rotation or translation or a mixture of both?). That's why my work didn't meet the expectations.
Also, similar experiments had been done before for a decade and never any signs of aging had shown. I had had some difficulties before. So it was not that probable I would be right about my "new physics". ;)
It still stinks you got a poor grade for having a difficult project. At least you passed though.
Yes. :)
in germany, grade 6 is the worst. ;-)
Pretty sure you meant something like 1++