Attitude Vs A's

My hp beeped at 7.43pm last night. It was an sms from my labmate. 'X this morning said she's not going to do anymore PCR with her newly designed 5 sets of primer. What a waste.' Labmate was kinda unhappy with X's attitude, I could sense that.

X is actually an undergrad of our lab. There's nothing really wrong with her personality but I guess it's the attitude that needs to be improved. Well, you see, initially she hurried into designing a set of primers without studying the structure of her gene of interest properly (which I had advised her earlier on). After that, she realised that the region that she needs to amplify is way too big and can only be amplified using a few sets of primers, so she requested to design new primer sets. By that time, it's actually quite close towards the end of final year project deadline but she insisted and so we proceeded for synthesis. End up she's not going to use them? 5 sets of primers, 100+ mers, each mer is about RM 1.8, wasted just like that? I mean nobody is going to use the primers cause none of us is going to study that gene. How about the money wasted? It's tax payers money wasted for nothing! No wonder my labmate is a bit annoyed because she is in need to synthesise her primers but now has to wait for new purchase order to be out and that takes time (X has used up 100+ mers of previous order).

According to labmate, X got an A for her last sem final year project grading and she bet X will get an A too this sem. To me, research is not just about getting A's. What is the use of 3-4 years of tertiary education if one cannot become a better person despite the many A's one gets? With a transcript of many A's, one could probably secure a good job in the beginning but with D or E kind of attitude, how far could one go?

(Similar issue from my previous entry http://maxiangru.blogspot.com/2009/04/undergrads-nowadays.html)