- Ideally, before you start an experiment you come up with the protocol that you're going to follow while you execute it. So either you type it up or you write it down and you just have a step by step checklist for how you're going to actually carry out the experiment. And you have that with you at the bench, pretty much at all times. So you have that piece of paper with you. 

When I was doing my experiments, I would also make sure, as I was carrying out the steps or when I was collecting data, I would have a paper notebook with me, to write down observations or any changes that I made to the protocol, and I'm also a pretty visual person so I would make small drawings or doodles in my lab notebook of the things that I observed. 

Although those things are really helpful to have with you in the moment at the bench, pieces of paper tend to be pretty impermanent, so they are easy to get lost or easy to get damaged. So it's really important, especially nowadays, as we move more to the digital age in science, to make sure that you have some kind of digital record keeping along with your paper notes. 

So after I would carry out an experiment, I would take my written notes and transcribe them into sort of a digital notebook. So I would type out what my observations were, and if I made any drawings I made sure to take photos of those and put that into my digital notebook. That way I always had sort of a carbon copy of my messy notes that I took at the bench, so that if I came back to the data a year or five years afterwards, I had it in pretty clean condition that were pretty well preserved, because they were digital. 

I would block off like hours at a time where I would just sit down at my computer with my cup of tea and as few distractions as possible. You know, I would put on some classical music or something like that and I would just sit with my paper notebook and just try to transcribe my notes by typing them out. And I think by giving yourself the time and space to do that, no only does it help you have more well kept, more organized notes, but that process of transcribing them often helped me to reflect a little bit more on what I was seeing. Because I wouldn't just collect all the data and then forget about it. By transcribing the information I was sort of taking it in again and turning it over in my head again and coming up with new ideas based off of it. 

So structurally what was I doing with my record keeping? So for my written paper notebook, it was pretty much like scratch paper. I would put the date at the top, and maybe a short title to remind myself what experiment I was doing, and then I would just kind of write whatever I saw, and it was pretty disorganized to some extent. 

But when I moved that information to my digital notebook, because I was taking that time to really lay out exactly where all the data fit in, I made sure to have every experiment in my notebook have sort of a defining structure. So I put an experiment ID at the start of every entry, with a short, descriptive title of what the experiment was, and then I would have a few sections for every entry. So I would start with just the background for the experiment. Why am I doing this experiment? What inspired me to do this experiment? What papers did I read or prior experiments did I do that lead me to doing the experiment that I'm talking about now. And because it's digital, I was able to actually put hyperlinks to PDFs or other papers that I read so that another person that's interested in reading about my experiments can actually see what my thought process was. Also within the background, I tried as often as possible to put explicitly what my question was for the experiment, what my hypothesis was for the experiment, and what my expected results were. And that was all the background. 

The next section was the experimental design. So, that section was literally a bulleted list of exactly what I did at the bench from the beginning of the experiment to the end. And I would often put dates for when each step was done, so that I knew approximately what the timescale was. So on May 18th I sterilized my May seeds, on May 20th I transferred them to agar media. Oh but also on May 19th I prepared the agar media and this was the composition of the media and I autoclaved it for this amount of time, and I stored it in these conditions. So, I would walk through all those steps in the experimental design section. 

The next section in the entries was results and observation, which was just a dumping ground for all of the data that I collected. So I would have all of my handwritten observations, I would transcribe those into that section. I would also have any spreadsheets in that area, any explanatory figures would go there, any photographs that I took would go into that section, just all of my data that I collected. 

And then the last section that I would have in every entry was conclusions and future directions. So, based on the data that I have observed, what do I conclude? What new information have I learned? What meaning can I extract from the data? And it's important to separate out those two sections in your mind as well as in you writing. The results and your interpretation of those results are separate. So I would put them in separate sections. In addition to my interpretation of the experiment, I also had future directions. So based on what I saw, what am I going to do next? I mean, it's never the end of the line of inquiry. You know, science is a continuous process. So, the results of one experiment often lead to inspiring new experiments. So based on this one particular experiment, what am I going to do next? Sometimes it would literally be, I need to do this again. Or, I need to do this again but modify something slightly. Or, I'm done with this because I'm dropping that project. But just having some notion of what the future holds for that line of inquiry is always important when you finish up an experiment.