A breakthrough

So the last time I watched the PCR process the whole way through the thing that baffled me the most was the 'paperwork'.
As I am training with QC there is, of course, a great deal of documentation . . . a great deal.
This documentation takes the form of many many excel sheets. Most labs that I have been in use excel a great deal so it wasn't their spreadsheetness that was getting to me.
I was presented with a lot of names (gene names and batch names and plate names) and numbers that I absolutely didn't recognize and became quickly disoriented. It was discouraging.
Today because my main robot was down for maintenance I got a chance to see the whole process again.
This time something clicked.
I attribute this breakthrough in large part to my forensics class. We are currently studying DNA analysis and have hit the PCR section.
The textbook is not enjoyable reading so after I look it over I tend to go to YouTube and watch videos about anything that is confusing me.
I felt a lot of personal pressure this week to write good conference posts because this is my thing.
I work with RNA every day and am learning PCR right now. I have access to as many experts as I want and have the advantage of having in the concrete something the others only have in the abstract.
So I have been watching about 2 hours a day of YouTube videos on DNA replication and on PCR.
I have been really gratified with my classmates responses to my posts. Its hard to gauge how much of the positive response is the 'required number of posts to a classmate a week' and how much is genuine appreciation for my breaking things down and linking helpful videos but so far so good.
Because of all of this I went into today's PCR training with a much better idea of what I was seeing. Additionally several of the acronyms started to match up with things I already know.
When I used to make genome plates I learned Hs for Human MM for mouse Rn for Rat etc. and today I saw that in that huge list of confusing names those abbreviations featured prominently.
PPHsxxxx is a primer for human DNA PPMmxxx is for mouse and so on. I got that all the genomic DNA starts with a GH and all the cDNA starts with a "c". As a huge bonus I remembered that in China dates are written differently than they are here and suddenly the huge random string of numbers were dates 20130912 was on everything from today.
The reading breakthrough combined with better base knowledge made me feel so much better about learning this stuff.
Next Monday I will run my first RT2 plate.