Beamtime

So real work as a PhD student has finally begun. I had my first beamtime this weekend and it was 8 shifts (64 hours) of experimental time from friday afternoon till monday morning at 7am continuously. Thanks to mostly luck, I had people who would come and make sure things were going well at night so I could get some sleep, but significantly less than normal. We managed to align and measure around 50 bones automatically. While less than we had planned a decent feat. It was also nice to make the first real measurable dent into my project as the first year is now over, so it's time to get grinding.
I have never as fully appreciated the differences between engineering/physics project and real biological projects. With many of the engineering (specifically image processing/analysis) ones, it is nice to be done quickly, but there is lots of room for tweaking, and fixing little bugs later. You can really for the most part write code whenever it pleases you and as long as you work hard enough, it will work out. The biology projects really demand a huge tracks of dedicated time to do experiments and everything has to work perfectly or you could set your research project back years (destroying samples for example, many of the samples are unique or at least several decades in the making)
The setup I had at the Swiss Light Source