Science is a wonderful field with many career options. You can become anything from a physicist to a physician. While the love and passion a student feels for their science-related major can be through the roof, there is always the lovely lab component waiting for us. Whether it be three hours or four hours, there's plenty of time to think. While you may love the professor, getting through some parts of the lab (especially the basics) can be enough to drive someone to their limits.
1. The microscope - live it, love it, learn it.
Some professors spend five minutes on it, some spend five hours, others five days. The microscope becomes your best friend, your buddy, your soulmate. It almost has as much significance in your life as your phone, except you can't go to oil immersion by accident and be terrified for your life.
2. It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... I really have no idea.
You try your best to guess what you're looking at, but all attempts seem to fail. As you look closer and closer and go to higher and higher magnification levels, you realize you might have to accept your fate and ask for help. Tissue layers merge into one, dust looks like a new species, and sometimes you spend so much time looking at nothing you may just hallucinate.
3. How close or wide are my eyes anyway?
Microscopes are perfect at making you feel cross-eyed, or even at making you cross-eyed and you just don't feel it. Constantly changing the spacing between the lenses can be a pain, but it's either that or spend your time with one eye looking at the specimen and the other staring blankly at the table.
4. Can time travel faster? Wait, no, not that fast.
You wait for an experiment to run so you sit down for a minute to write in your lab notebook. Your pen touches the paper and your experiment's timer beeps. You go to the sink to rinse your beakers, and you're late to dinner. You look into the microscope to double-check that what you're drawing is accurate, and suddenly you're missing graduation.
5. Why am I here?
For those that aren't science majors and are simply doing it for the requirement, the look on their faces during lab can range from pure confusion to pure concern (and of course there are those that have no problem in lab). The psychology majors are analyzing their lab partners too closely, the mathematics majors are deciding what equation is best to use, and the education major would rather teach their future students about the mouse rather than perform an experiment on it.
