Carry On.

The beginning of summer welcomed me with my first real job.  Although I have been working in my lab since June 2012, my boss wanted to pay me to work forty hours a week for the summer.  This was all pretty exciting and overwhelming but as I got into the swing of things, I rather enjoyed the different kinds of freedom that come with a job (and not with school).  A couple of weeks into summer, an employee announced that she was not returning to the lab.  The announcement was poorly timed as this marked the second valuable person to leave the lab within a month, leaving much of the responsibility unexpectedly in the hands of my grad student and myself.  While my grad student undertook more of the technical responsibilities that come with a lab, I tackled the day-to-day maintenance and management.  Feeling like a child, I meekly tried to swallow the new responsibilities.

As the days went by, I found myself proud of how far I had come and proud of the work I had accomplished.  I was scheduling people, organizing pieces, fixing problems and making everything run as smoothly as possible.  Lab became a challenge and I wanted to surprise people with the way I handled myself.  However, as the summer months flew by I felt like my efforts were going unnoticed.  I wondered if anyone knew how difficult my job was when it wasn't even really my job.  I began to feel disgruntled-- the same feeling that overwhelmed me last year when my experiment was unsuccessful.  This is all to say the novelty and challenge wore off and I was merely fulfilling my responsibility until I could pass the job along to the new girl.

But today, the past sixteen months became worth it.  I stopped by my boss's office to check in after a brief (and absolutely wonderful) weekend at home.  As we were going over the agenda for the month, he stopped.  He said thank you.  He said he wanted me to know how much he appreciated me going above and beyond what my undergraduate status required me to do.  Someone really noticed.

This sincere appreciation came from a man who rarely gives compliments.  When he does, it means something.  I swear the nicest thing he had said to me previously was along the lines of, "once in awhile you get an undergrad that is slightly more competent than the others; one that you can trust with more responsibility, kind of like you" -- slightly more competent.  So this moment spread light like a flashlight in a power outage on all of the days that I had felt unappreciated and alone.  All of the mornings, nights and weekends I worked for the sake of the lab became instantly worth it.  Not to go all crazy but I'm just short of restoring my faith in humanity.  Notice how I said "just short", thus retaining an ounce of sanity.  Better luck next time, humanity.

"Well, I woke to the sound of silence, The cries were cutting like knives in a fist fight... We are who we are, On our darkest day, When we're miles away, So we'll come, We will find our way home"