Working Together to Achieve Success

Working against time requires a lot of concentration and efficient time management. This week became the third consecutive week of water sample collection for my investigation on multi-resistant bacteria.

Tuesday morning is the designated time to go and take the samples for the lab, dia de gira. Next, during the afternoon I am in charge of filtering my water samples. However, this week had more of a rush during the road-trip day [Tuesday] because last week, the big incubators where we usually place our bacteria were not working so we were limited on the amount of plates we stored.

After the arrival of the gira I realized I had so much to do: first, do the membrane filtration of the 4 water samples that were taken in the morning and this time I had to decide on which dilutions I would work. Then, my second task was to finish the antibiotic susceptibility test (PSA in Spanish) with the bacteria that I had found during ‘Week 2’.

As I was walking back from lunch, I was thinking over and over on how I would make everything work. It was a lot of work in a very short amount of time and I was getting crazy on not finding a solution. I had to walk in front of my mentor’s office so the solution would arrive to my hands.

She told me that one of my colleagues could help me complete the experiments as she was going to finish earlier that day. I started the membrane filtration by myself, as I am the expert on it already, and then we both started the PSA technique.

We divided the work load in half, I did the difficult part and I explained to her how to do the second part. Talking and joking was limited because we were working against time. By the time we finished the last Petri dish plate it was 15 minutes before 5 p.m. Sometimes you cannot do all things by yourself and you need to work in a team to meet the target.