I feel bad after a meeting with my PI.
My PI and I had a meeting last week that was pretty rough for me. At one point she stated that she doesn't think I care about my research anymore, which isn't true. It's just that when it took a year just to order a virus, and we began working on other things and she said we could just get my PhD done by wrapping up other papers, my frame of reference for how to complete my PhD shifted. I got the virus recently, and I am excited to work on it! But when I asked when I'm graduating as an off-handed question, she seemed genuinely offended, and that's what prompted this whole meeting.
Some background: I'm diagnosed autistic. When I brought that up, she said our disabilities center would be able to help with our communication but I sincerely don't know how. I'm 3 months postpartum. She didn't have kids and she brought up my baby during this meeting and suggested I need to stop thinking about her during the work day, which really upset me as I'm doing my best but she's such a little baby and I'm such a young mom. I'm also my PI's last grad student, and our lab is under serious financial pressure. Thus, I feel like a failure when literally anything goes wrong.
Anyway, it seems like her big problem with my work is consistency. I am the only grad student in my lab, always have been, and therefore don't have any exemplars nor close peers who can help me figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. I have wrestled every single protocol and had to experiment with them all because there's no one around to show me how to run them. The postdoc who left as I was coming in left me a generic western blot protocol which couldn't possibly have been the method he used because when I ran it, it categorically did not work. I ended up working for almost a year to rewrite the protocol to fit our protein of interest (thanks to my fellow labrats for helping me at critical moments!). Even then, I have failures regularly. A postdoc from another lab, who taught me westerns, told me that he still has regular failures and it's normal. But my PI doesn't think so, and it feels like she thinks it's a failure in my consistency or care that the results aren't exactly the same every time.
Similarly, I do brain surgeries on animals and they fail maybe 50% of the time. I was shown the surgery in person one time and otherwise just have an old video to go off of. I just feel like I don't really have anyone I can ask questions to, or get tips and tricks from. I also had a long and painful stint with cell cultures. I kept mammalian cells going for over a year. I kept contaminating them and ultimately wasn't able to get all four plasmids transfected in one cycle so I cobbled together two transfection cycles.
There are other protocols I'm great at, including IHC, perfusion, and cryosectioning. But even with these I sometimes mess up. Like last week I ran an IHC on 3-year-old slides that were in the -80 and I guess it crossed my mind that they were old but I went ahead with it anyway and lo and behold, the IHC completely failed (presumably due to age, as IHCs conducted before and since both succeeded) and I wasted a couple hundred in resources. And as soon as I googled it, of course all the sources said to not IHC after 1yr in storage. But when I explained that to her, she called her neighboring PI into the office and that PI informed us that her lab will IHC sections stored for a few years, even.
It just made me feel so deflated. I feel like maybe she sees me as "moving fast and breaking things" which might be true but it's not exactly how I want it to be. I just feel like I'm constantly iterating because the last one wasn't good enough for her or my standards. I wonder if I fail more than other students or if they just don't tell her as often that they changed something. I wonder if I really am too inconsistent and not built for this.