I was pretty down earlier this week when everyone in my research group suddenly turned against my recent data and said it had to be wrong. I went back and adjusted some calibration parameters and reran all of the numbers, but things didn’t change too much. The trend that had them up in arms was still there. But now the tables have turned! I realized that the article I was supposed to lead a discussion on today had data for a situation similar to mine and they found the same trend that I did. So I spent most of our meeting today not so much leading a discussion on said paper, but proving to everyone that I’d made my measurements carefully and correctly and that my results constitute a clear continuation of the results of the previous paper. In the end, I won. No more questioning whether Nicole knows what she’s doing!
Instead, my advisor insisted that we add more of my–or rather our–data to the presentation he’s making at a conference next week. Win!
*grin* And I’m sure you weren’t the least bit smug about it.