Reality Check Lab Meeting

Each member of my lab presents in lab meeting only once every 5 months so that one meeting's importance becomes amplified much more than it should be. I went into mine a week ago thinking I was just awesome. I had been optimizing set up for a screen and had what I thought was a very strong positive control and very low background noise, basically a perfect setup for the next legs of the experiment. Perhaps I had thought too highly of myself, because my PI's suggestions that the parameters still needed to be even better and further optimized came out sounding like "This data sucks. Do better." His critical attitude and shrewd comments are precisely why I like working with him, but sometimes encouragement is hard to come by. Thankfully, one of the postdocs came up to me afterward to tell that he thought my data was very high quality and reassured me that the PI was impressed but would not be the type to say so outright. I was tearing up because I was so glad that at least someone had encouraging words and seemed to understand that I needed them then!