When all the fledgling researchers returned to their seats the teachers continued explaining the next task to the class.

“Now that you have your protective gear on, we’ll be having you individually go through copies of our theorists' research requests which are in the binder in front of you. Your task is to complete as many of the requests as possible by the end of the week. That is five days. You will only be allowed in this room for those five days from 8 to 5 pm. When you are done for the day you may leave your notes in your notebook, but do not leave your name or any other indication of who you are in this room. You may begin,” the researcher and theorist explained.

As soon as the teachers allowed everyone to begin you could hear people frantically opening their binders and papers flying. Carmen also opened her notebook not quite sure about what she would find. All the requests were experiments that needed to be done. The worst part was that they were all handwritten and photocopied black and white, which Carmen noticed after flipping through all the paper. They always say that smart people have terrible handwriting and most of these people writing these experiment requests did. Instead of trying to begin with the first experiment in her notebook, Carmen decided to organize the notebook into two sections: the experiments with handwriting she could read and the experiments that she couldn’t read. She used a page from her notebook which was nicely hole punched to separate the two sections. Then she decided to read through the experiments that were in the readable section and began with the ones that particularly interested her. She was wondering if the owner of her lab coat also wrote an experiment that was in the notebook. It would be in blue ink, she thought, but with the black and white copies, there was no way of knowing which experiment it could be.  

The experiments that were being requested which were from a collection of 20 people, the same number of people that were in Carmen’s class right now, covered a huge range of topics: biology, chemistry, physics, geoscience, and everything in between. Seven of the readable experiments were biology-related, they asked for simple things like characteristics of cells under a microscope or morphology of cells on different nutrient agar. Carmen knew that some of these experiments needed to be done earlier than later, but she knew that it was impossible to complete all the experiments, so she focused on the experiments that she could read.

There were 15 experiments in her readable section after reading through all of them she isolated the ones that she felt she could complete but didn’t need to be started today, there were only five that were simple like that. The other ten were multistep, multiday experiments. One of those ten required three days. But there was always time between experiments that with some planning you could get more than one experiment done in a day. The first ones that Carmen wanted to do were the microbiology ones, they weren’t micro bio per se, but used microbes in one way or another. For some of those experiments, she needed to prepare agar plates, and for others, she needed to start a culture overnight. So her first task was to make up the agar she needed since it needed a day or two to dry before bacteria could be plated or streaked onto it. The agar would be used for those seven biology experiments and three that could be classified as biochemistry or biophysics.