People who know me at least a little bit know that patience is definitely not one of my virtues, which doesn't bode too well for a career in science. When I started grad school, I noticed that I had more patience waiting for my experiments to stop running than I did for certain situations outside of work. Lately though... I haven't had much patience for ANYTHING, including bad experiment results.
I don't even have a good reason to feel rushed; I'm nowhere close to graduating, and the only person who's complaining about how little data I've gathered is myself. I have a problem accepting that are some lab days where the only "benchwork" there is to do is wait for cells/animals to grow, and I feel pretty guilty when I'm in lab and not doing benchwork. One of my friends pointed out that benchwork isn't the only way to be productive, but that's also something I have difficulty realizing.
I think the anxiety might rub off on others, namely my advisor. He was working on a paper that I contributed some data to, and I got a draft of it about two weeks ago. It's not complete at all, but I was visibly anxious about getting a draft to look at. I think I asked him every (other) day about it until he sent it. Hopefully he's just thinking I was super excited to get my name printed on something... which I am, but for some reason I still feel I need to push harder to get another paper out.
By now it sounds like my only interest is in boosting my resume. While more publications is always a good thing, there's obviously a limit to how much I can do within a certain period of time. My biggest problem right now is that I feel rushed to produce something, and get really upset/jump to conclusions when things don't work the first time around, regardless of me making some stupid mistake that caused it not to work. I'm hoping it's just a phase I'm going through, but in the meantime, I should probably find something to calm my nerves...
