Run and Tumble

Finished lab practical #1 last night. I think I did ok, but I did mess up a bit. Here’s where I’m predicting I lost points, and subsequently, what I’ve got to focus on.

• Ran out of time before finishing 3rd streak on my streak plate. I’ve got to learn to work a little more quickly, but still carefully. Mainly, I’ve got to be quicker with probe heating/cooling.
• I caught myself writing down a few brainfart mistakes. I’m hoping that I caught all the ones I made. I’ve got to stop tensing up over stuff I know.
• I can easily rattle off all sorts of terms for colony morphologies and cell morphology/arrangement. Unfortunately, I’ve been practicing with diagrams or picture-perfect textbook micrographs. In the real world, things can have a mostly entire margin, but be edging into undulate territory. Or, you’ll see definite cocci on a slide, but have to make a judgment call on whether they’re tetrads that occasionally broke apart into diplococci or diplococci that occasionally glommed together into tetrads. I should look at a bunch of non-ideal examples, make those judgement calls, and then compare them to commonly accepted answer.

I’m not too worried about my grade, and I’m all about making mistakes and moving on, but it would’ve been nice to continue batting 1000.

Oh, one part that gave me no trouble was using the scope to find bacteria on a slide I prepped. So, that’s a victory.