CMB course in Australia DAY 9

More statistics today... Again, work, work, work... Actually I love what we learnt today. I think I really enjoy the way the statistic works with the microbial data and interpreting it in ecological sense.

At the end of the day, we had to do a quick presentation on experimental design, and graphs. One of the near-to-graduate PhD student presented her methods on one of the experiments which just got published on PlosOne journal.After she presented, the lecturer commented on her experimental design, and told her she can improve on it. The conversation got a bit heated with her trying to defend her work (since she published it!), and the lecturer trying to tell her not to just blindly accept things just because some other people said so. And she burst out in tears! Personally, I think the lecturer is right - her experimental design can be improved! However, two things that bug me more on this scenario are :

1. The refusal to accept that there is a better way, and be prepared to be better (the next time maybe?)
2. The ability to take criticism, and in this case, such a nice lecturer who actually speak very nice and polite even when he was talking about making the experimental design better.

Sign... I think very soon we need to be nursing and worrying about the feelings of PhD students