James: A week @ NPL - Day 1

Occasionally in research you need equipment that your university does not have so you are required to go away to another university or facility.
I have had the opportunity to spend this week at the national physics laboratories to conduct some resistivity tests.
With coming away to do work it means you spend a lot of time planning and preparing so you become naturally very invested and excited about the experiment you are going to do. Myself when I turned up this morning had butterflies and loads of nervous energy. But unfortunately this works both ways; almost immediately what we were looking to do failed, which was totally gut wrenching. Still NPL is an impressive facility and we have been able to use their workshop in order to 'rescue' the work. This is the nature of research however, the work you are doing has never been done before so even with your best guess you don't know what is actually going to happen.
Looking forward to tomorrow (still) and a new attempt, let us hope I don't have to start again rethink.